Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching.
All right, well, I got my cool intro again.
Thanks.
I am happy to be back.
It has been busy, as expected.
It's been super exciting.
Let's get you caught up on where the game stands now.
Let's get you caught up on where the game stands now and what's happened.
First, we played the intro last time on the FTP challenge,
or the, I've got to check it, 150 file status.
And it's relevant because these numbers,
when we say 403 forbidden for this web server challenge
and 150 file status for the FTP challenge,
these are actually the text error codes and text codes
that are used when your computer accesses an FTP website,
which is just a way to transfer files.
In fact, it stands for File Transfer Protocol.
And on HTTP, that's what your web browser does.
That 403 is when you're trying to transfer files.
When you access a website and you don't have permission,
it will say 403 forbidden.
So that's kind of where those names of some
of these challenges come from.
It's specifically referring to these error codes or these codes
that are used to do different types of transactions.
So we mentioned, I think in the last broadcast,
that we had just seen Poland can into space successfully solve
this FTP challenge.
It's one of the slightly more difficult challenges.
Right before the game ended, after our broadcast, SolarWine,
was able to access the FTP service as well.
So they were able to successfully exploit it.
They moved up a little bit on the scoreboard.
And that was the end of the day.
But let's go ahead and see a quick summary of that SolarWine team
in case you don't remember who they are.
After two years of great performance and top slots
from SolarWine, we expected good things from them.
And while they had a little bit of a rough start,
they've definitely been picking it up.
This morning, however, a third team
joined the top performers in terms of the exploitation,
specifically solving that FTP challenge.
And that was Team Organizers, who has the best trolly name.
Because when I say the organizers,
of course, I don't mean the competition organizers,
the people running it.
I mean the Team Organizers.
So here's a little bit more information about them.
So let's take a look at the scoreboard
on the computer here in a second.
I'm going to pull up and show you what the scores look like
as a result of some of these scores,
as well as some other ones coming up.
And one thing that I want to mention, as I pull it up here,
you'll see overnight we had actually this kind of flat.
Makes sense.
The game was paused.
And so the times are still showing up here.
But the teams couldn't do anything either good or bad.
So right here, we have this bump up right at the last minute
from should be Team SolarWine, if I can highlight that.
Did I just write that?
Yeah, that purple, the purple one right there is SolarWine
right before the game went on pause.
That was them scoring.
And then, of course, you can see organizers here
with their increase in points there.
So that's how they've bumped their scores up.
But, of course, the big one here is, as we've seen, Poland came.
We'll talk more about how they were able to pull away so much
and to really establish this padding in a little bit.
But overnight, we had this little bit of gap.
The game was scheduled to start at 6 a.m.
.
I was still sleeping, thankfully.
But the competition team was behind the scenes, hard at work.
There was a short delay.
So it was about 18 minutes delay that happened.
Really, this is just a factor of there's a lot of pieces,
not only in the digital twin, in the virtualization environment,
but multiple pieces in the scoring system.
And so they were just working through some kinks,
making sure everything came up kind of smoothly from that suspend
and resume kind of thing.
And so that was a short 18-minute delay.
And so you're going to see the end
of the game has been moved back accordingly.
We're going to give teams
the exact same amount of time.
And that means that the game end has been moved back.
I guess it would be 3 p.m. Pacific, plus three minutes
for those three minutes that we mentioned earlier,
plus the 18 minutes from this morning.
So it'll be a little bit shifted back from the original end.
We're still going to be on the broadcast here
at 4 p.m. Pacific as well.
So it won't impact that.
But let's keep an eye on the scoreboard now.
Let's talk about what this big bump right here was, right?
So I said Poland came.
You can see that the teams have really pulled away,
and you can see it.
They've got several big bumps here.
This was them solving a challenge
that no one else has gotten to yet.
More details on that one later.
Probably we'll have to hold that until the end of the broadcast,
and we can talk some more details about that.
Some of the stuff we have to be careful
from a fairness perspective.
We don't want to share too much information.
But this later bump here, this was actually points
that should have been awarded earlier.
It turns out there was a new type of challenge
that teams have known about, and these are called the,
these things called the last one.
the science team missions.
Let's go ahead though and take about,
while I roll in a whiteboard here
to talk about those missions,
let's go ahead and see the video for PolandCan
because they did such a great job pushing this lead out,
pulling up into the front.
Let's go see a bit more information about their team.
All right, so now we can talk about something really cool.
Okay, so this is one that I've been excited
to talk about this entire event.
And this is the science missions.
And so the teams were given this information.
They were earlier, one of the earlier challenges,
the four, three forbidden challenge.
As they solved that,
they got access to some additional
information that told them some greater details
about the science mission.
You can actually see it.
And so later on, I'll probably pull it up on the laptop.
If not, this is one of the visualizations
that's on the website that shows you that globe
I showed earlier where you can actually see
the ground stations.
There's a giant big cone.
Actually, hold on.
Before, yeah, let's go ahead and do this.
I'm gonna go back to the computer
and keep people on their toes.
So I'm gonna pull up my computer here in a second.
And I gotta switch over to the right tab.
Right here.
So this is the rendering of the game.
This is live right now.
It's showing where the flat sets are,
where the ground stations are,
who controls which ground station,
and this giant red cone down here.
You remember earlier, we saw like the pointing
and we made a big deal early on.
It was exciting to see the very first team
move their ground station.
They were aiming their antenna.
Well, this one is this giant red cone.
And this here is down at the South Pole.
So if we kind of flip around here,
you just saw even flash green there for a second.
So that flash of green was the science station
broadcasting a mission.
So down there at McMurdo in the Antarctic,
there is an actual real research station.
And we're modeling and using that
for these particular challenges
that we call the science missions.
And so the competition organizers have a variety
of targets in the solar system
that the teams have to point at.
The idea is that there's not actually a modeled telescope
and taking pictures and doing a 3D kind of rendering.
But they have to point this sort of virtual telescope
on their flat set at a destination.
But to get that information,
they have to connect to the science station.
So they're getting that information
from the science station,
but you'll notice it's broadcasting in this big wide cone.
So, okay, I'm gonna come back now to the whiteboard.
And the reason we have two separate ground stations here,
of course, there's more than that, right?
Each team at the South Pole, also as a notice,
we've got the globe flipped upside down, right?
So this is intentional that we're kind of upside down.
This is the South Pole here.
And there's actually eight different ground stations
for each of the teams very close together
over here on one of these.
And those are the ones with very narrow cones, right?
And so they communicate their signal to their flat sets
or to others, as we've seen other teams doing earlier,
as it's been a little chaotic
with them trying to impact each other.
They're able to talk by pointing,
but they have to aim very carefully to target them.
On the other hand, the science station,
as you can see, is a very small space.
You can see in that rendering before,
it has a massive broadcast cone, right?
It's really able to hit a wide area,
which means you're not worried about pointing.
Anywhere above that, these flat sets
can get that information and then downlink it.
And so this is the important part of this challenge,
is that each of the satellites has to be first told
by their ground station or one of the ground stations
that the teams control.
And remember, we were talking about
those other ground stations all throughout the globe.
This is why it becomes so important
instead of just waiting for a ground station
on the North Pole, ground station on the South Pole,
and waiting for those windows,
they can use those other ground stations
to get more communication with their satellite.
They can get more opportunities to either control it,
tell it to do something else, talk to a different system.
And so that's where those have kind of been constantly
in battle and in play throughout the event
since teams have discovered
how to access those ground stations.
So the teams first tell their flat set,
we want you to tune in,
just like, you know, think about like an FM radio.
They've got to tune in to the right frequency,
they've got to tune in with the right settings,
they've got to get the information from the science station
and that tells them the current mission.
Because these missions are changing over time.
And that's what makes these particularly important, right?
So there was a couple different types of challenges
and points that we've talked about.
Those SLA points are just always important
because getting SLA will keep you points over time
and that lets you build up a lead
that people kind of can't get back from you.
Things like solving the FTP challenge,
things like solving 403 Forbidden Challenge,
I think solving those challenges are a bucket of points,
but even if another team comes in several hours later
and solves it,
they're gonna get the same number of points.
The question is, what are you doing with your access?
Did that thing give you more information?
Did that give you access to something
that you didn't have before?
In the case of the ground stations,
does that give you more communication?
So you have to not only just solve them
and you don't kind of keep resolving them in most cases,
you got the points, you're done with that bucket of points,
but now you use them.
You're gonna use that access,
use the information you got to do something else.
And so in this case, these science missions,
these are changing missions that are being broadcast
and we have seen PolandCAN successfully solve five of these.
So on that scoreboard, that was that second big bump.
There was a minor glitch in the score submission.
So you'll see one little kind of bump
and then you'll see a bigger bump.
That was just the score system being tested, validated,
and those other four points going in.
For future science mission updates from any team,
we should see them smaller bumps, kind of more gradual.
But that's what's given them the lead.
So the satellite gets tasked to tune in.
It has to then point and actually they're reorienting
their satellite to a target.
In fact, I know for a fact that one of the ones
that Poland did was Uranus.
So yes, they successfully grabbed a flag from Uranus
that this was, this is a thing that happened.
It is what it is.
And so they then had to take
that information though.
After keeping the pointing on target,
they have to downlink that information.
So because the data in the satellite doesn't do any good,
you have to get it back down to the science station
and then you're gonna get more of these points.
And so that's a new pool of points now
that teams are starting to access
and it could have an effect on the final placement.
PolandCAN though, really putting a good lead
by having not only that earlier technical challenge,
but also now getting these science missions.
So it's gonna be definitely really hard, I think,
for the other teams.
To catch up at this point.
So this is, I wanna look at the desk.
This is the first time maybe you all have heard
some of this stuff.
Is there any questions you guys got?
I don't know, I mean, we're over here
like trying to take all this in,
but we were just kind of figuring out, you know.
I'm a little curious.
So you mentioned science missions.
How many different missions or challenges
are structured around, I guess, the science concept?
How many science missions are there, I guess?
I forget the exact total.
We can bring back some of the ordinances and get them.
But the science missions cycle out,
they're live for a certain period of time.
So you've actually got like,
I think about an hour to do one,
or maybe even a little bit more,
to do one of these missions.
So you've got some time to get it done
and send the results back.
And then they're cycling every,
I think the exact interval,
but like there's a smaller interval.
So like every, say, 15 minutes,
there's a different science mission.
But you can't, so you can actually queue up
a couple of them.
You can solve a couple of them,
then you can downlink a couple of them if you wanted.
Because they do last,
like it's not like once one science mission ends,
it's immediately out of scope.
You could actually do a couple at a time.
Is there still one overarching science ground station,
or an Antarctica ground station,
or are there still eight, one per team?
So there is, one per team,
these are the ones that they always have access to.
So we should really draw like a little,
you know, kind of like times eight here, exactly.
Like shadow them out.
Like there are eight of these
that they always have access to.
And that's the ones with the narrow cone
that they always point to.
And they've got access to it.
Great picture, by the way, really helped me.
I wish I drew this,
but thanks Coulter for putting together the pretty stuff.
My hand scratches on top of it.
The other science station antenna, though, is always there.
And as we just saw in that visualization,
you'll see that blink, that green flash,
that's it broadcasting a mission, right?
And so those missions are going to change over time.
And then it's up to them to get as many as they can.
But it's not just a matter of pointing to,
I want to reiterate, as they're pointing,
you know, in this case,
if they're pointing to Saturn, for example,
they've got to reorient it.
And as their orbit moves,
they've got to continue to adjust.
So it's not just like point once and done.
They've actually got to,
much like the ground stations have to track
for like a very tight overhead arc for these LEO orbits
that we've got, these low Earth orbits,
where they're kind of like whizzing by overhead
pretty quickly, to keep talking to it,
you have to keep pointing at it.
That same is true to a lesser extent of the satellite.
So throughout, it has to keep on target
for a certain period.
I believe it's a six minute interval,
same as the scoring intervals.
They've got to keep aimed at it.
And then once they've done that,
then they successfully, you know, data shows up as,
oh, you've got the imagery data,
you've got the telescope data.
It's just some kind of random data.
It's unique for that mission.
And then the next time around,
or if you're still overhead,
you can downlink that to the science station
and that's what gets you the points.
So that's a successful science mission.
Just taking the picture doesn't count
if you can't get access to it.
You've got to actually send that data back.
Okay, thank you for that explanation.
It'll be interesting to see all the challenges
and read up on them later on,
on the website, once they're posted.
Yeah.
I did have another question though.
Shoot, yeah.
Let's go back to, you know,
I've never played in a CTF.
We did pause the game, right?
Yep.
So I'm thinking,
if I'm a competitor,
I'm trying to find the nearest pillow,
lay down and get some shut-eye.
Is that a little wrong to think?
Are these guys working other things
and prep for game time turned back on?
Or are they really all trying to get rest?
So when I was younger,
I used to try to pull all-nighters
and go straight through.
I don't do that anymore.
I really do think that it's important to get your rest.
And usually any team that I'm on,
but especially for an event like this,
and especially for those teams
that are in other time zones.
And they have it much harder, to be clear.
Yes.
Our European friends and folks
that are not in the same time zone,
it can be a little bit more difficult.
Sure.
Although it'll be nice next year
when we're all in person in Vegas,
because then that'll be one less issue.
They've got to kind of figure out,
are we going to try to like,
one person takes a nap early,
sleeps early and then gets up later.
Okay.
Do we kind of arrange shift coverage?
Exactly.
So that's something that teams,
I know, will definitely do.
This is also where that team size comes into play.
Remember we said earlier,
some of these, if the team only has nine players,
it's a lot harder to like work these shifts
and make sure you always have coverage,
maybe during the window.
Okay.
So some of the teams,
well, it's rather,
I think just about every one of the team
probably had things they could have been doing overnight.
Okay.
And this actually comes up,
so this comes up a lot.
DEF CON captured the flag
where I've played in the finals many years.
The same thing used to happen.
Not every year though do they do it now,
but it used to be,
you would go to bed,
or you wouldn't go to bed
because you would come back,
the game had paused,
but you still had things you were working on.
You were still reverse engineering,
you're still trying to write exploits,
you're still testing,
you're still trying to work things out.
Yeah.
So you still had stuff to do.
And I think that was basically the case
for every one of the teams,
all had something to be doing overnight.
Okay.
Hopefully they got some rest though,
because you just aren't as effective if you don't, but.
I mean, the excitement alone
is probably gonna keep you up a little bit.
Exactly.
But.
A little bit of adrenaline.
Okay, so speaking of like excitement
and new things going on. Yeah.
One of the other things that we did
was the competition team released a new challenge
this morning,
and it was called Risk V Business,
or Risk Dash Five.
I like that.
It's, and this is,
actually it kind of a funny thing
that the competition organizers do,
and just in time, right before this broadcast,
I got word that every team had now accessed
all of the ground stations.
So there were two types of ground stations
we mentioned earlier.
We had those five and five that were up for grabs,
and the one was called Coffee Grounds,
and we had talked about that yesterday,
and that was a little bit easier.
I think most teams had access to that earlier.
The second one was called Sacred Grounds,
and it was called Sacred Grounds,
because one, it's a ground station,
and of course the plain words of Sacred Grounds,
but also because the vulnerability there,
which we cannot talk about because everybody has solved it,
was a padding oracle attack,
which is a particular type of cryptography attack
that is basically, in cryptography,
when you encrypt a message,
your messages are always a fixed size
for most types of encryption,
and so you always have to,
but what if the thing you want to encrypt
isn't the same size as like the algorithm would do?
Well, you have some padding that you put at the end,
and it turned out there's a type of vulnerability
where because of this fixed known type of padding
that goes in there,
you can abuse that to leak out some information.
You can use that to decrypt some information
that you shouldn't have access to,
and that's essentially what the teams had to do here
to get access to that access key
that they then used to get onto those ground stations,
and so this was solved by everybody now,
and so I can reveal that like, yes,
this is the, this is not the organizer, sorry.
This is the competition team.
Yes.
Or, you know, I'm gonna get you organized.
Just so you know that.
The competition team being a little cheeky
with the name of the challenge,
so you don't always do this with challenges,
but it's pretty common,
so of course, RISC-V business, same kind of thing.
It's risky business, but RISC-V is a CPU architecture,
so like the x86 in your Windows laptop or desktop,
or the ARM in your phone or Apple laptop.
These are different types of CPUs.
RISC-V is a kind of newer, more modern design of a CPU,
and so just looking at that name,
you see RISC-V business as a team,
you know you're looking at a challenge
that's gonna be on a RISC platform,
so one of the systems involved here is running RISC,
and they're gonna be looking at that,
and so that'll be a good challenge.
There's some really cool stuff that opens up,
and so we'll see if anyone solves that,
and then what they do with that at our next broadcast,
and we can really kind of talk about everything.
So that was the last challenge for the event.
That's a new challenge introduced in the game,
so there's no other,
so the teams were told this a little bit earlier,
there's no other expected surprises at the last minute
from now to the end of the game.
Everything's in play.
Not everyone maybe has found everything
or has access to all of them,
depending on where they're at.
Some of the teams are still solving things
and working their way through,
but everything is out there.
It's on the table.
It's on the table, exactly.
All things are available there.
So let's go check out the scoreboard.
I talked around this a lot,
but let's go to the computer,
and we'll bring up the scoreboard information.
And let it play.
Of course, we've got a really, really cool visualization.
So again, this is starting
from the beginning of the day yesterday.
So most of this is recap.
We already saw a lot of this stuff.
That was the craziness,
wild and crazy throughout the day.
Overnight, again,
so we have this last little bit from SolarWine.
Remember, we saw them jump up right at the very end
as they were able to get the FTP challenge.
Overnight, nothing happens.
Then at the beginning, we've got SLAs coming,
and we've got the jump here from organizers,
and we've got a couple of updates here now.
What we haven't seen that is visible
on the other score,
actually, I guess we could pull it up right over here,
is that I believe we've got,
yeah, Samurai made that last little one.
That was, thank you for getting that.
That's what let me talk about the fun pun that we had.
And so they're really coming in tight now at the end,
and may see them jump up even further, actually.
I expect they probably won't end up there.
They might be able to get a few more ground stations,
and that might actually get them higher
than they're at right now.
So it's been a little more calm today.
It's not quite the craziness,
but we're definitely still seeing
these kind of big jumps, right?
So we've got the organizers here solving the 150 file status.
Polican really just doing a fantastic job
pulling away into the lead.
It's not insurmountable, again,
especially with this new challenge that was just dropped.
It's a cool challenge,
and there's some neat stuff that could happen with it.
So we will see.
What you're not seeing here,
but the teams are experiencing, is the chaos now,
what we described as Pandora's box yesterday,
where the teams are really starting
to interact with each other.
They're starting to worry about
defending their systems against others' malicious attacks.
And so that's been happening kind of behind the scenes,
but you can see it a little bit here,
and this is what I really like about it.
I mentioned this before,
but I do think it's important to talk again
about those points, right?
The type of points.
Those SLA points are points you can't get back
if you miss out on them.
And so while these big bumps look great,
other teams can get them later and get the same big bump.
What matters really is, one,
either just put everybody away,
like Polican is so far,
and just get such a lead
that your SLA doesn't matter quite so much,
that you could flatline SLA
and still hold out for a while.
But we can start to see
some really interesting slope changes.
So the way that, for example,
Solar Wine has been passed by SpaceBitsRUs,
Solar Wine has been experiencing some issues with their SLA.
Now, whether these are induced by others
or their own mistakes,
we'll talk more about at the end,
but all we know right now here
is that we're seeing a little bit of degradation
in their SLA.
Their satellite's not performing up to snuff,
and they've had a couple of space tuffs,
and they've had some issues.
So we'll talk about how that's been happening.
But you can clearly see SpaceBitsRUs,
not impacted by this at all.
Nice, straight slope.
And even in particular,
we can also look down here,
knowing that Samurai, for example,
has actually, since we generated this image,
this video jumped up a little bit more,
their slope is better than Perfect Blue,
so we expect them to continue to pass them
because they've had better SLA.
So we're seeing where that SLA
is really gonna determine
a lot of these kind of final placements
as people,
as people either pass each other or fall
or aren't able to do as well.
So that's gonna be cool to see
how people are able to do that at the end.
As well as again,
there are several real technical challenges out there
that have not been solved,
and those will be like those big bumps.
And depending on the timing,
and depending on where those go,
that could matter more than the SLA.
Maybe it's the SLA that does the tire break.
It's gonna be, yeah, fun to see
because while it's certainly looking great for Poland Cane,
if I were them, I'd be happy.
I wouldn't be asleep at the wheel
because there are still lots of hours left to play,
and there are still several challenges
that nobody has solved,
and those are big, big point bumps
that could impact things.
All right, so that's it from the desk,
from me at the sideline here.
Back to you at the desk.
That's awesome.
You know, you make a good comment there.
We've been hanging out,
and all these exciting things are happening,
and I will say that our team
that's developed this entire competition,
it's just made up of very smart, very intelligent,
but such fun, down-to-earth people,
and I'm so glad that you can see that,
and they have an opportunity to throw some of their fun
and their personality and have these fun names
and these play on words.
It just makes this all great.
Yep, definitely.
Awesome.
Well, thanks, Jordan.
We are all loving this new information.
So, Kev, I think we're pretty close
that you're building the CTF team or what?
Let's do it, yep.
Cool.
Never say never.
Awesome.
Well, I think it's time that we pivot
and share some future Hackasat 4 information
with our viewers.
Definitely.
So, now we're gonna welcome on a guest,
Aaron Myrick from the Aerospace Corporation.
He's the lead for one of the satellites
that's being developed to make Hackasat 4
really out of this world.
Kev, see what you did there.
Maybe a little corny, but all right.
So, let's talk satellites, right?
Moonlighter is a CubeSat that is currently being built
for training security researchers
on securing space vehicles.
It will be launching next spring,
just in time to host Hackasat 4.
Yep, definitely.
So, again, we have Aaron Myrick here
from the Aerospace Corporation
to tell us more about Moonlighter.
Hey, Aaron.
So, while we've been in LA this week,
we were actually able
to go next door to your facility
and get eyes on Moonlighter.
Well, let's start high level.
What can you tell us about it?
Right, so the main mission of Moonlighter
is that we want to be able to build a satellite
that provides capabilities
and conduct repeatable cyber experiments.
And so, this will enable us
to have these sorts of experiments in a live setting
and take things from theory or a lab environment
into something that's real,
into a real on-orbit system and real exercise.
And something that's,
this has been really challenging in this area
over the years.
So, I think it's fair to say
we're pushing the envelope
for more secure and resilient space systems.
Yep, most definitely.
Now, Aaron, let's give the viewers some insight
into where Moonlighter development currently is.
Right, Kevin.
So, the design of the vehicle was completed this year.
So, we've done some thermal analysis
based on our projected orbit.
We did a concept of operations.
And right now, we're doing a mechanical fitment check.
Well, hold on a second.
Not the Space Force person here,
but what's a mechanical fitment check?
Right, so we have all of the components
that we're going to be using for the vehicle,
making sure it fits within the bounds of the chassis
from the launch provider that we have.
Got it, okay, thank you.
So, that's our list of checked off items.
What's being done now?
So, we're doing assembly integration and tests.
So, we're screening all the components that are coming in,
getting all the pieces together that are necessary
for an integrated test campaign
before we ship it to the launch provider.
So, wait, essentially we're at the point
where we're assembling the real deal satellite?
Right, and as part of that,
we're doing thermal cycling.
And so, we're taking our components
and the digital interfaces through the operational range
of the vehicle at its orbit.
And so, we're taking it from minus 34 C to 71 C.
And for those of you in the US
that don't know Celsius and Fahrenheit,
that's minus 29.2 degrees Fahrenheit,
all the way up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, that's pretty neat.
But Aaron, I'm assuming this isn't done
in your kitchen oven at home.
So, where is that testing done?
Is that in the lab that we were visiting?
Yeah, so we have a vacuum chamber there
where we can adjust the temperatures.
And we're going to be wrapping up that testing
and be ready for launch of Moonlighter in 2023.
Wow, that's fascinating.
So, let's fast forward to March then.
The launch was successful.
Now, what orbit will Moonlighter actually be operating in?
So, we're also going to be at a low Earth orbit.
So, something these teams have hopefully dealt with
at this point.
And we call that LEO.
That's going to be an altitude for this vehicle
of around 470 kilometers.
And an inclination of 51.6 degrees.
Sounds good to me.
So, from a cyber testing angle,
what about Moonlighter's design is unique
from other vehicles that you've worked with in the past?
Yeah.
So, we've really had to think about the different failure modes
that may happen from a cyber perspective
and build in protections to subsystems.
When you do cyber experiments like this,
we really have to worry about the health and safety
of the vehicle and the recovery of that vehicle
in a lot of different circumstances.
So, you know, maybe it's going to be a little bit
of a cyber experiment.
Something like a CTF.
Maybe one called hack-a-set.
Yeah.
So, this means designing things and reprogramming things,
resetting things in a variety of ways
so that we don't get trapped behind dead components
that we can't recover.
Wow.
This is all clearly complex.
Did you and your colleagues run into any challenges
or issues during Moonlighter's development?
Yeah.
The hardest thing, actually, is trying to keep the scope
of the vehicle in check.
So, normally, when you build space vehicles,
you have a specific sensor that's going to tell you
if it's gathering specific data or you're providing
some sort of service, like satellite communications.
And for a vehicle that's a fairly narrowly scoped problem,
since what we're trying to do here is provide a test platform,
there's a lot of what-ifs that are kind of hard
and decisions that we have to make that may impact
how it's used in certain situations.
So, what we did was we started with a set of experiments
that we'd like to accomplish.
But then when you build a test platform,
you want it to be as flexible as possible
so that you can do things that you really haven't
thought about yet.
So, that's been really challenging to make some
of those design trade-offs for the vehicle.
So, I imagine it's tough to dry run an issue, right?
Like your example case, you can't just launch a satellite
into space and bring it back.
Not without some big heat sink or having an issue.
And much more behind that, right?
Cool.
Well, thanks a bunch, Aaron.
It's honestly, it's beneficial for us newbies, especially,
to get a better understanding of how satellites are made
and what it takes to launch one.
Everyone in the Hackathon is doing a great job
at that.
We're excited to see Moonlighter launch.
And until then, we'll be working hard to bring the world
its first-ever on-orbit CTF.
Exactly.
You heard that right.
The first one ever.
Now, Rachel, before we let Aaron go,
we've got a Twitter question that he can help answer.
This is from at Tman74651, and he asked,
why did you pick the name Moonlighter?
Well, there's actually a couple of reasons.
But one of them is that there's a really cool plant in Australia.
It's a whole lot of fun.
It's called a Moonlighter plant, and it actually lights up at night a little bit
and has these lovely stinging hairs that'll interact with you.
That sounds like a plant that I would not want to run into.
No, you definitely be careful with that.
Well, thanks again, Aaron.
So, Kevin, let's throw in one more question that I think is really important
for all of our viewers.
At ChrisWilliams93 asked, where do I sign up for next year?
That's a great question.
So be sure to watch for the HackSat 4 quals registration,
which will be opening up next spring.
But leading up to that, you'll want to sign up for our
mailing list and also follow us on Twitter for all the latest details.
We invite anyone and everyone to join us for next year's game.
In the meantime, please keep those questions coming.
Yep, definitely.
And that about wraps it up for us this morning.
As all our competitors finish out the final hours of the game,
our game designers need to start preparing to announce the rewards.
Yeah, so be sure to come back here at 4 p.m. Pacific today
when we will be talking to Jeff Moss, founder of DEFCON,
announcing the winners of HackSat 3 and letting our game developers
finally take a well-earned break.
Absolutely.
Thank you to everyone tuning in at home.
Make sure those alarms are set for later today.
We'll see you then.
We'll see you then.
Thank you.