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Welcome back to TinyMike Interviews at DEF CON 31.

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Today we have Rachel here.

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And we're at the Hack-a-Sat contest area.

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So tell me about this project.

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Because you were telling me before that this has been happening...

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I've been in the works for four years.

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Exactly .

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Yep.

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So a little bit of history.

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We have been at DEF CON with Aerospace Village.

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We're kind of in conjunction this year and happy to be here with them.

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So in years past, we have run a CCF, a qualification event, and a finals event.

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However, what's exciting this year is not only are we live in person for our CTF finals, we have our teams in front of us.

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We also have an orbiting satellite for Hack-a-Sat 4.

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And so that has been the biggest change from year one to four.

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We've been in a four-year iteration of design, build, break.

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And we are finally breaking because we have a satellite to hack out there on orbit.

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And that's really, really exciting for us.

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So this is the actual satellite that's in orbit.

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This is the model of the actual satellite.

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Yes, so Moonlighter, as we call it, is a 3U CubeSat.

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It is out in LEO orbiting in space.

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Our teams are communicating that through our game ops and satellite ops behind me.

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And this is quite literally how it looks, how it's designed.

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The camera on top, the wings on the side for the solar panels.

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This is quite literally as real as it gets.

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So why are they actually hacking?

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What's the end goal of this CTF, of this competition?

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So these teams, the five teams that are here with us today, they competed in quals.

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They placed in the top five.

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They came here today to quite literally have the ability to contact the satellite, send commands up, receive commands back down.

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And that's ultimately how they're being scored.

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We do have some ground station challenges.

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But for the most part, this is a space CTF, the first of its kind.

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And so they are sending things up to the satellite, waiting for their information to come back down and see how it goes.

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Things like taking pictures with the satellite.

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You know, anything orbital mechanics, you name it, we try to involve it, include it.

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And the team so far so good.

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I mean, that sounds so cool.

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So they are actually hacking on a live satellite right now that's in space.

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Yes.

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Low Earth orbit.

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Low Earth orbit.

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So we were launched in June out of Florida on the SpaceX 28 mission.

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That was an ISS resupply.

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In July, we have a nice video we shot out of the ISS as it was out in space to get into our own orbit.

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So the bird went off.

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We were able to get live footage of that.

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And so we've been up in space now about a month on our own.

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Things are going really well.

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Knock on wood.

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And so, yeah, so the teams, the communicating with that satellite, a lot of the visuals in here and what the teams are really focused on are contact windows.

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So we have times that we're on contact and then some downtime where they're getting all their calculations and doing all of the smart things that it takes to complete a CTF.

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And then those contact windows are very crucial for our game.

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Someone was saying, how often is the contact window?

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So there is a schedule that the teams have, and that is what we're projecting up here.

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It changes each day.

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So it's never the same each day.

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But we have pretty good contact windows today.

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We did decide to extend the game time to utilize the contact windows today surrounding our game hours.

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And tomorrow, 10 to 6, we're our best contact windows again.

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And so we'll utilize those.

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Now, behind the scenes in the dark tonight, our teams, all of our ops teams will still be utilizing contact windows, making sure our scoring, all the data coming up and down from that is still in progress and going well.

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What's your favorite task that they have to execute?

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Oh, man.

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My favorite task is definitely the picture taking.

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I think for us, it's the most tangible.

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You get something down that anybody can digest and understand that these guys and what they're doing, that's literally cause and effect.

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And so that's really exciting for us.

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They're so in the zone.

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And for people who are watching at home, is there anything you'd love to let them know about?

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Yeah.

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So honestly, at home, just because you're home doesn't mean you're missing out.

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So Hackasad.com, we have quite literally all the information that we are sharing is there.

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Our scoreboard is live.

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It's ever changing.

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A lot of our tracking is on there as well.

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Our website is full of knowledge.

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And what's really fun is after this is over, give us a little bit of time.

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But all of the challenge, all of the solvers, and it's all posted on GitHub through our website.

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So folks can digest it.

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You can pretend like you were here and try it yourself and see if you weren't super good at it.

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Look at the solvers.

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Look at what we put out there and learn.

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And we would love for people to do that.

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That's awesome.

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Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule.

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Thank you for having us here.

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This is awesome.

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Definitely check out the website.

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What's the website again?

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Hackasad.com That's awesome.

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Thank you so much for this.

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Thank you .

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It was awesome.

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Yes.