There we go. Welcome to Understanding Space Through a Cybersecurity Lens. I'm Jerry Sellers.
And a little bit about me. So I did 20 years in the Air Force, mainly space stuff. I worked space
shuttle mission control back in the day. I worked about 14 different shuttle flights, including
on console for the Challenger accident and then worked return to flight after that. So if you
saw the movie Apollo 13, anybody, I actually worked for Gene Kranz back in the day. Then
a bunch of other stuff in the Air Force, all space related. I retired from the Air Force in 2004.
And then our small company, TSDI, we do training and workforce development and
system engineering consulting kind of all over the industry. So I'm also adjunct at
Stevens Institute of Technology and at Georgetown, do some graduate courses with them. And I'm an
Agile guy, so I teach Agile around the industry a bit too. I'm here today with two other folks
helping me out. So I'll turn first over to Terri. Terri, if you want to say a few words about yourself.
Hi there. I am Terri Johnson and I'm the chair of the Computer Networking and Cyber Department
at Pikes Peak Community College, located here in Colorado Springs. I started in IT over 20 years
ago, really specializing in computer networking and then securing those computer networks,
starting out with Deloitte and Anderson, two of the big five or whatever they're called now,
tax and audit firms. And then I realized that I really have this love for education and have
served on as both faculty and staff in K-12 and higher ed.
Like when I have free time, I really like to spend it on beaches.
So you're... and I'm coming to you from Colorado and actually all of us are in Colorado,
so she's at a virtual beach back there. And then helped today too by Jason. Jason,
say a quick word about yourself. Yes, I am a high school student. I'm
interested in computer science and cybersecurity. I am on the robotics team and I participate in a
number of local coding competitions and I'm just going to be helping out here.
So he's getting a little experience rubbing shoulders virtually with
the folks in the cyber community. So this is good practice for him today. So our company is TSTI,
so we do training consulting around the industry. We like to say we have a front row seat to the
industry. We get to see what kind of challenges everybody has at NASA, ESA, DOD, industry.
We work on a lot of... support a lot of textbook development work and we... our company does
on-site training back when you can do that. We've kind of pivoted 100% virtual training
since COVID. We also do coaching and integrated programs and then we do other consulting,
especially in model-based system engineering. It's a very growing area for us.
So I saw one question in there in the chat about reasonable rockets. Let's hold that question.
That's a good one to bring up when we get to the break. So if you've got specific questions about
the material, I'll probably handle that right then. If it's a good question, but I think we
might deserve a deeper answer, I might wait until the break. So if you're okay with that,
that's how we'll proceed. So here's our overview of what we're going to try to do this afternoon.
I'm going to start with big picture. We want to know the context for space. And that context is
also the context in which cybersecurity has to occur with respect to space. So we'll tackle that
and we'll look at this thing we call a space mission architecture and how all the puzzle
pieces that have to go together to make a space mission be successful. We'll then look at various
opportunities. So opportunities for people to do necessarily possibly the various things.
And with respect to that, we'll look at orbital mechanics and mission operations. We'll focus on
those two, if you will, threat surfaces. And then we'll look at specific threats having to do with
natural environment in space and the man-made environment. And we're going to see the natural
environment is pretty darn nasty. So it's hard enough to work in space, let alone just throw
humans on there to try and do bad things. But we'll try to understand both of those potential
threat areas. And then we'll end up this afternoon looking at vulnerabilities. And we'll look at two
key vulnerabilities, one being RF links. So the RF systems, radio frequency systems shown there in
cartoon as uplinks, downlinks. These are the pipes that carry the data that we use in missions.
And then we'll talk a bit about the space data architectures that we use in ground and onboard
systems. So here's our objective. Oh, sorry. First of all, this course is based around this textbook.
So there's a textbook called Understanding Space. And it's available through that website.
This is part of the Space Technology Series. I think there's roughly up to 30 books now in that
series that tackle all kinds of different space subjects. So if you're interested in
pretty much anything to do in space, there's a textbook probably for it. But this is the
introductory book. And a lot of the material here, the images came out of that book. So if you're
interested in that, you can try to get a copy of that. So here's our objectives for the afternoon.
We're going to start by trying to build some core space knowledge. So we're basically launching you
on a trajectory here, where we're going to start by, you know, laying the foundation and launch pad
with our core space knowledge, what is the space mission architecture,
and that kind of thing. And then we'll look at how we build upon that to understand the
basic capabilities and trade-offs and limitations as they apply specifically to the cybersecurity
domain. We're going to focus on orbital mechanics and the opportunities or lack thereof that that
creates for getting access to space systems, and then look at the operational architectures as well
and see how that can constrain access. As I said, we'll focus on the natural and human-made
threats that can be out there, especially the natural ones, and what kind of vulnerabilities
that comes out from there, as we look at things like radio frequency links and the
data architecture. So somebody's asked for the recording. I think we'll be posting that recording.
I just sent the morning recording off to the organizers. So they're going to put that on
Discord somewhere. I don't know where they put that. But if you... did I put my email?
Yeah, no, I didn't. Yeah, I put my email address. So if anything comes up in this course or
afterwards, please feel free to reach out to me. If you can't find the recording or whatever,
I can get it for you. So please feel free to track us down if you need to. So here's our
agenda. We're in afternoon session, day one over there on the left. So we're just getting started.
And you see the course is broken into kind of half-hour segments. So we'll tackle a subject
for about a half an hour. And then I've got some poll questions that I'll ask you, just kind of
see if you've been paying attention. And it also gives us a chance to discuss some of the topics
a little deeper. We'll have time for a little stretch break in there. And also we can tackle
any sort of other questions that you might come up with that are a little off-topic,
but I wanted to build in some time to talk about those somewhat off-topic questions. We have some
great questions this morning about slingshot trajectories and other stuff. So again, kind of
any questions, spare game out here. So feel free to come up with stuff. We've got time built in
to do that. So we'll hit each section roughly by a half hour, take a poll, have a short break,
and then we'll get right back at it. And then you want to save up some energy for the very end,
because then we're going to have a little cybersecurity challenge for all of you. So I'm
going to present you with a scenario and you're going to have to think through what you do to
respond to that potential cybersecurity scenario. So get ready for that. That's coming here at the
end of the afternoon. So it should be pretty action-packed, hopefully a fun afternoon for you.
So let's start with the contents. So I'm a big picture guy. I like to think about, okay, what,
you know, how does this, let me show you the, you know, I can't put together the pieces of
the puzzle until you show me the picture on the front of the box. Okay. So this is the picture
on the front of the box of what the puzzle is going to look like. And that puzzle has these
various key pieces that we want to look at. We call that, we put that whole puzzle together,
we call it the space mission architecture, which includes orbits and trajectories, spacecraft,
vehicles, operations, and at the core there, we have the mission itself. So we want to know how
all those pieces go together. That's what we're going to start by tackling. And to do that,
we want to first understand, well, why, because we're going to look at the mission,
why do we go to space at all? You know, what are the reasons that we would even bother spending
all this money, time, effort, risking people's lives to go to space? And space, it turns out,
is a pretty big industry. I think as of last year, the latest numbers I saw, space is a
$420 billion industry. I mean, it rivals the airline industry in terms of size. So it's a
pretty big industry. So where's all this money coming from? Why are people even making money
in space? Why do we go to the time and trouble to go to space? So we list here what we call
space impurities, the unique aspects about space that make us want to go there. And so we have
global perspective, clear view of the heavens, free fall environment, resources, and the final
frontier. So those, those reasons, those five reasons we might go to space, which do you think
is the single most important? The reason that we most often go to space, and the reason most people
make money in space? Who wants to guess which of those five are the most important?
But you just put it in the chat, or you can shout out.
I'd say the global perspective, you can see the whole world.
Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. So I live in Colorado. So I like to tell people,
the reason we go to space is to get high. That's the main reason we go to space,
because it's higher. By being higher, we can see more stuff, right? The more I can see,
the better I can understand what's going on. If we could simply build a tall tower and look down,
we'd probably prefer to do that. But we can't build a tower quite that tall. Although I have
some colleagues trying to build a space elevator, but that's another discussion. But, but by being,
being high, we can see more, right? And the more I can see, the more I can understand
what's going on. It turns out back in the, back in the 50s, in 1957, when the Russians launched
Sputnik, they actually did us a favor. They, they, they established the precedent, international law,
that you can overfly any country from space. Now, you can't overfly any country in the air,
you can't just get an airplane and go fly over Canada, they wouldn't like that.
But you can overfly Canada from space. There, that's international law, that's an okay thing
to do. So that, that established space is sort of open sky in terms of the ability to go over
and overfly anything that's out there. So that was Sputnik 1. And then later on,
they flew a couple other missions. And then anybody know the first animal to fly in space?
The Russians flew the first animal in space. Yeah, the dog, the dog was named Laika. You may
remember Laika? So Laika, Laika was a dog that flew in space. And of course, we didn't know much
about Laika, you know, during the Soviet times. But after the fall of Soviet Union, information
came out about Laika. And it turns out, Laika was not any ordinary dog. They scoured the entire
Soviet Union to find a special dog, because they wanted to have a talking dog, because they
couldn't have an air-to-ground link. So they, they needed a talking dog to talk to the dog.
So Laika was a talking dog. And when Laika came down to land there, she was supposed to land on
the land. But you know, the early times, her guidance wasn't that accurate. So she ended up
landing in the, in the, in the sea. It was a stormy night, and a little capsule got kind of
tossed around. And they finally got the capsule up on the beach, and they opened up the hatch,
and Laika came trotting down. They said, Laika, how was the trip? And she said, rough. So yeah,
talking dog, Laika. But so actually, that's a lie. Laika couldn't talk. Actually, Laika,
unfortunately, burned up on re-entry, which is why the Russians say they invented the hot dog.
So, but there we go. So, but I digress. So we get up there to be high, we get there to see what's
going on. And that's the most important reason. These other reasons are cool, too. But in terms
of making money, being high is where it's about. So while we're up there, we can do some cool
things. So being high, one of the most important things we can do is provide communication. So
Arthur Clarke came up with this idea. Arthur is a science fiction writer. He came up with this
idea in the 40s. Actually, somebody else came up with it, but he's popular for stating it,
is that if I could put a satellite that two people could see on opposite sides of the Earth,
and they can both see the satellite, then we could talk through that satellite. So we can relay
information through that satellite. That special orbit we can use to do that is called geostationary
orbit. We'll talk about that here in a little while. And if you look at the bottom picture
there, you can see out of the, this is not quite the scale, the geostationary orbit is pretty
popular. There's roughly 400 active satellites up there in geostationary orbit, mostly doing
communication. And they're not really stacked up like little bb's there. That's just showing how
many are in a given slot. The slots are pretty big, about a one degree slot, roughly 360 degrees,
if you will, around the Earth, roughly one degree slots. So there can be more than one
satellite in a slot. But it's a very popular place to be. If you own a slot, if you have
license to use a slot, that's literally money in the bank. So it's like owning beachfront property
because they're not making any more of it. So very popular place to operate from in space.
You can kind of see where the popular places are. You can see there's a lot kind of over in Europe,
a lot over in North America, a lot over Asia, not so much over the middle of the Pacific.
So that's where most of the money being made in space today is, is in geostationary com.
The other big area that's not so much a moneymaker, although people do make money on GPS,
but is certainly an enabler for the global economy, is navigation, and really position
navigation and timing, global geospatial navigation services. And of course, the most
most popular there is GPS, the global positioning system operated by the Air Force, now Space Force.
And then of course, there's GLONASS, there's the Chinese Beidou system, and there's Galileo,
the new European system. So there's more and more systems coming available, which is good,
it gives us some backup. Because if you think about it, the entire global economy
depends on this capability for position navigation and timing. If you were to take out that capability,
the world economy would be worse shape than it is right now. So really bad. ATMs wouldn't work,
wouldn't be able to use a lot of global communication. And of course, you know,
people would get lost. So all this is key. So it's and the ability to do GPS is provided by
the fact that we can put satellites in a high orbit. And standing on Earth, I can see at least
four satellites at any one time, four times, it turns out to be the magic number I need to solve
the problem. So I can see four satellites at once, usually, I can see more than that.
I can get that by having those satellites up there in a very high orbit. So any place on Earth,
you can always see at least four satellites. So that's simply an advantage of being up there high.
And I'm here on Earth, I can access those satellites quite easily. And now I have the
ability to do my navigation. So that high ground, again, that global perspective
is being leveraged by GPS and other navigation systems. And of course, the other thing we can
do by being up there is we can look down, we can look down and take pictures of what's happening
on Earth. So that's our what we broadly call remote sensing kind of missions. And, and of
course, obvious one would be something like the nightly weather report, you just had a hurricane
pass off the coast of Florida. So you probably saw some of the images from that all came from
satellites. We have satellites in geostationary orbit and in low Earth orbit
that monitor the weather. And then we have all kinds of satellites that do imaging.
Planet Labs has a whole number of satellites they do for daily imaging of the Earth. And you can do
low resolution, high resolution. Of course, the military does very high resolution imagery spy
satellite type things. We have missions like that do just environmental monitoring that will look
for ozone monitoring and things like that. Landsat is a long term mission that has been
flown now for gosh, going on 40 years, that they've been monitoring the Earth's environment
for that long. So nice longitudinal data in terms of behavior. And these spy satellites all go back
to the early days. So one of the very first, well, the first military satellite we tried to build was
to do was spy satellites. And that was a mission called Corona, not to be confused with the beer
or the virus. But the Corona mission was stood up by the National Reconnaissance Office at the
time. That was his job was to go do that. And to give you an idea of the priority, their 13th
flight was successful. They had 12 consecutive failures and still got funding to keep going.
And they launched these satellites up into space. This is now the early 60s.
How did they get the pictures down?
Anybody know how they got the pictures down?
What's that?
I know, when they dropped like film rolls?
Yes, they, they ejected the film rolls from the satellite, the satellite, the film rolls
entered the containers, obviously, enter the atmosphere, and then they popped a parachute,
and then they would snatch them out of the air. And then they would send them to a place called
photomat. And you get your pictures back in a couple of weeks, right? That was the
Instagram of the day, right? That's when we use this stuff called film. Yeah, hard to believe
that they actually literally launched rolls of film, and then parachuted the rolls of film down
from outer space. It's hard to hard to imagine. But that's what they did. It wasn't until the 70s
that they went to all digital. So I mean, you can pretty much, you know, thank spy satellites for
the digital capability, digital camera capability, you have on your cell phone today, and the ability
to develop the CCDs and that sort of technology came and was pushed by remote sensing kind of
missions. So again, why there? Why can we do this? Because we're above the earth because we're high
because we can see what's going on. So let's explore that architecture now a little bit deeper
now that we understand why we're going to space. And the first part of our architecture is why
is the mission, right? And so in 1961, President Kennedy gave a very famous speech about going to
the moon. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is
out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project
in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration
of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
So in that case, Kennedy outlined a very simple mission, right? At least simple in terms of
articulating it, right? Land a man on the moon, turn him safely to the earth, end of the decade.
Three goals and objectives right there. So what we want to know about any mission is, first of all,
what need are we addressing? Here it was the need to, you know, beat the Russians. But then what
are the goals and objectives we're trying to accomplish? And how do we plan to go about
accomplishing that? We call that the concept of operations. So we want to know all those things
to give us an idea of the why. Once we know the why, we can figure out the how. And the how
usually starts with a spacecraft. So a spacecraft is a satellite in orbit, and we'll talk about
orbits a bit later here. And that satellite's going to do a job. And that satellite, we can
break into two parts. We call it the payload and the bus. So the payload is the part that's doing
the mission. It's taking the pictures, it's sending the... it's relaying the HPO signal,
whatever it is its mission is doing. And then the bus is there to support the payload. So just like
our little cartoon in the bottom there, the button, you know, the school bus's job is to get
the payload, the kids, school. So that payload... we got a live mic here...
that payload then is getting transported by the bus. And so the bus has to have what? It has to
have structure, it has to have, you know, propulsion, it has to have a radio, air conditioning, all the things
to keep the payload happy. And that's what we're doing in any mission, right? We have the
bus carrying the payload, the payload's doing the mission, the bus is carrying the payload.
And we typically will often... sometimes we'll actually split up the operations with that.
There's a DOD mission where the Army operates the payload and the Air Force, I guess now Space
Force, operates the bus. And that's a... because it's a big mission and it's a lot to manage, so they
split that between two organizations. And some science missions may have a dozen
different payloads, and so you may have multiple payload operators for different parts of that.
So that's kind of how we want to think about our mission. We have our mission at the center,
have our spacecraft that's doing the job, and we have the payload that's actually doing the
interaction, taking the pictures, the bus supporting the payload. And then we... once we're up there,
the spacecraft has to operate from an orbit. And as we're going to see, we can think about an orbit
like a big racetrack. And so once I get into that racetrack, I'm going to be going around,
around the Earth all day long, and then I'm going to look down. And when I look down, I'm going to
see some amount of the Earth. How much I see depends on how high I am, right? The higher I am,
more of the Earth I can see. As I look down then, that cone that you see in that cartoon on the
bottom, that cone has a field of regard. The field of regard is everything I potentially can see.
And then the field of view is what I actually do see when I, say, point my camera. I've got an
animation of that coming up a little bit later. And then that swath, you see that line across
there, that tells you how much of the Earth I can see as I'm kind of going around the Earth. So that
swath... think about mowing a lawn, right? I'm mowing a swath across the Earth, and depending
on how high I am, and depending on some other factors of my mission, that'll tell you how wide
a swath I can cut. And if I cut a wide swath, then maybe I don't need to orbit the Earth very many
times to see everything. If I have a narrow swath, I may have to orbit the Earth quite a few times
before I see everything. And so that's going to be a big trade-off for us in terms of access to
information on the ground and access from the ground to the satellite, as we're going to see.
We'll look at a thing called ground tracks and see why that's important. The other piece of the
problem is getting to space. So here's our launch of the Atlas V launch of the NASA CIRUS-REx mission
from a couple of years ago. She had a big old Atlas V rocket and
liquid oxygen kerosene engines on the first stage there, RD-180 engines. And that's going to take
you into orbit, into that orbit we just talked about. Rockets are broken into stages, and that's
because of the just inherent limitations of the rocket technology we have today. In this case,
their stage is not recoverable. If I'd shown you Falcon 9, it'd probably show you recovering that
first stage. It's also LOX kerosene, it turns out. But that's how I'm going to get to orbit. And we're
going to see how much energy that launch vehicle has to deliver for me to get into orbit. Turns out
that's quite a bit. Once I'm up there, now I can start doing my mission. And the main reason I'm
in space, I'm up there, I'm high, I'm looking down at the earth, I'm up there either creating data or
moving data, right? So the whole name of the game in the space business is about ones and zeros going
from one point to another, right? How those ones and zeros get around are on all these links that
we're going to talk about. So that's that communication architecture we show there at
the top. So all of mission operations is about people, processes, and things for doing the job.
We've got a lot of things, a lot of infrastructure, manufacturing, launch capabilities,
communication networks. And then I have all the people, the mission management and operations
that are actually running the mission. So I have a classic picture down there at the bottom. That's
the Apollo 13 mission after they successfully got the astronauts back from their harrowing
experience. You see dozens of people there just in the front room. But a large mission like
human spaceflight, International Space Station, literally has thousands of people around the world
supporting that. Now, if I have a little CubeSat mission, maybe only have a dozen or so people
supporting that. But still, you've got people, right? People, processes, and things that we need
to run the mission. Then finally, we have system engineering and project management to pull it all
together. So system engineering is our process of turning a need into a capability. System
engineering is about balancing cost schedule performance along with risk to deliver our
mission successfully. And then we have our project management to lead the team and ultimately try
to deliver the program on cost, on schedule, on budget with acceptable risk. And then supporting
all that, and especially as we kind of emerge into this area of cyberspace and cybersecurity
for space, is we have an organization that we can call out here called Information Sharing and
Analysis Center, the ISAC, started just a year or so ago to look at trying to pull together some of
these threats and opportunities in cyberspace. So they work with industry and they work with
government, focusing on three key areas of supply chain, safety, business systems, and overall
missions to try to make sure that we're staying, keep the community aware of what the cybersecurity
issues could be. So there's our big picture context. I wanted to understand why we go to
space for that global perspective, what kinds of missions we do up there, especially communication,
remote sensing, and navigation. I want you to understand what we mean by that space mission
architecture that includes the mission itself, the spacecraft, the orbit, the launch vehicle,
mission operation systems as well. So from a cybersecurity standpoint, what we'd like you to
take away here is an understanding and appreciation for how important space is to the global economy.
Not only is it a big industry just by itself, and nearly half a billion, half a trillion dollars,
but it's integral to pretty much everything. So from cell phones, to power grids, to GPS,
to commercial transportation, and simply knowing where you are in commercial and financial markets,
we depend, we the world, depend on space. And of course, the more you depend on something,
the more vulnerable it can potentially be, and that's the vulnerability we want you to be aware
of. And because of that, space is becoming a larger attack vector that we have to focus on.
And then finally, just be aware of the space ISAC and what that collaborative groups like that can
help do for us. All right. There was a good question about reusable rockets I want to get to
in here in a second. But any specific questions about what we just covered in terms of big picture?
See, we ended up with a pretty healthy crowd. So that's great.
Any questions that came out from what we covered?
Yeah, I think I have a question. So I am French, so I have a French accent. So I hope you will,
you will be able to understand me. I have to go on another. So it was really
interesting. And thank you so much. And I have to go on another talk. But can I have your email
address? Because I would like to ask you some questions, but I need to leave now.
So is it possible that you write it in the chat, maybe?
Yeah, it was in the slides that I just put there too.
I didn't. Okay, well, that's really nice. Thank you so much. And I will need to leave
Zoom really soon.
Well, we'll be doing it again tomorrow and Sunday morning. So if you want to drop back.
At what time?
Tomorrow. Tomorrow's at nine and at 1.30.
Okay.
And then another one on Sunday at 9am.
Yep.
Okay. Is it written on the DEFCON schedule website with Aerospace Village?
I'm not sure. I didn't see it.
It should be. Matt should be able to answer that.
And if you check in the Discord, there's an Understanding Space Discord channel.
Okay. That's great. Thank you.
You bet. Any other specific questions from what we covered?
All right. I'm going to give you the poll.
So let's launch the poll there.
So take a couple of minutes to answer the poll.
And we will start back up in about 10 minutes.
So this gives you a chance to answer the poll.
And then we'll cover the poll.
And then we'll pick right back up there. And we're going to hit Opportunities.
So buckle up. We're going to talk about Orbital Mechanics when we get back.
So go ahead and take the poll. Take a stretch break if you need it.
And then we'll dive into Orbital Mechanics in a minute.
And do your best with the poll questions.
And then if there's any other questions you have from what we've covered so far,
or if there's something you want to make sure I do cover, please put that in the chat.
All right. I'm getting pretty good participation in the chat there or in the poll.
Give everybody another minute or two.
And then we'll go through the poll and see if we have any other questions.
And then we'll pick up from there.
All right. Let's see how we did in the poll here and share the results.
So... all right.
So single most important reason we go to space is to get high, right?
Ultimate high ground, to get that global perspective.
It's more than just getting above the atmosphere.
In fact, we'll see we don't always even get above the atmosphere completely.
It's about getting up there so we can see more stuff.
That's the single most important reason.
And it's not to experience zero G.
So we'll talk about that word. We don't like to use that word.
So the part of the spacecraft that does the business, basically does the mission,
we call that the payload, the thing that takes the pictures or collects science or whatever.
And then mission operations systems is all the ground and space-based infrastructure we need
to coordinate.
We call that the glue that holds the mission together.
So that's broadly, we call that mission operations systems.
Space capabilities, yep, definitely true.
It becomes so integral to everything we do.
It's hard to imagine life without space.
We've become, if anything, too dependent on it.
And then ISAC focuses on those key areas there,
supply chain, business systems, and missions.
So good stuff.
Any questions before we dive a bit into orbital mechanics?
Right. So when we're done here,
the goal is to make you all a genuine bonafide certified orbital mechanics.
So, and I can tell you where to buy the toolkit,
but you'll be an orbital mechanic.
You'll be certified to fix people's orbits.
You'll be all ready to go.
So that's what we're doing in this section is really focused on opportunities.
So where are the opportunities to actually do things to space systems?
And some of those are quite limited as we'll see,
based on things like orbital mechanics.
Some of them are quite open because we have a pretty wide
attack space potentially in the area of mission operations.
So we're going to look at orbits and operations
as two opportunity areas that we have to focus on.
So, as I said a little bit ago, that when we look at orbits,
the first order you can imagine an orbit is like a big racetrack.
So think of this racetrack going around the earth,
round and round all day.
I've got the Hubble Space Telescope in that racetrack,
and it's just going around and around all day long.
In the U.S., we have a kind of a popular sport called NASCAR.
And the joke is, you know, how do you escape
if a NASCAR person is chasing you?
And the answer is turn right.
Because in NASCAR, they just turn left all day long,
going around, around, around, around the track.
And that's pretty much what a satellite does.
It just goes around, around, around, around the track all day long.
In low earth orbit, that takes it about 90 minutes
to go once around the earth.
So it's roughly 15 times a day.
It's going to go around, around the earth.
And that's what it does.
And that's what we want it to do.
We want it to be predictable.
We want it to be in the same orbit all the time.
And those are things that they're going to help us
understand how to do our mission operations.
So we're trying to get into that racetrack.
Well, how do we get into that racetrack?
Well, to get into that racetrack, we have to remember
there's this thing called gravity.
And so if you drop something, it goes down
and you forget how gravity works.
Just remember the earth sucks.
It just pulls it down.
So if I drop a baseball, it's going to fall.
So in my cartoon in the upper right,
I now have two baseball players.
I have one who's going to drop a ball
and I have one who's going to throw a ball
from the same height at the same time.
So if I drop a ball and I throw a ball,
which one should hit first?
Well, way back in the day, there was a guy named Aristotle.
He thought that if you had a heavy ball and a light ball,
that the heavy ball would fall faster.
And it wasn't until Galileo came along and said,
hey, let's try it.
And he figured out, well, wait a minute,
heavy ball, light ball, everything falls at the same rate.
So it turns out gravity doesn't care
about the motion of the ball.
You can throw it, you can spin it,
you can do whatever you want to it.
It's still going to fall at the same rate,
which at the surface of the earth
is about 9.8 meters per second squared.
So if you don't believe me, I've got a little video here
that shows this simultaneous dropping and throwing.
So I'm going to drop a ball here
and throw a ball at the same time.
And you can see there in slow motion,
they're hitting at the same time.
If anybody likes the Mythbusters,
remember the Mythbusters,
they did one where they shot a bullet
and they dropped a bullet.
So the bullet went like 300 feet
and then hit the ground.
And they showed the same thing,
whether you drop it or even with a bullet,
right, it's still going to fall
at the same rate as when you drop.
Okay, so what does that mean?
Okay, so now we get a little thought experiment here
to understand orbits.
So picture the earth, right?
Imagine the earth is a perfect sphere.
If the earth were a perfect sphere,
then for every eight kilometers you go horizontally,
the earth curves away five meters.
So we're going to do a little thought experiment here.
We're going to build a tower on the earth
that's five meters tall.
And on that tower,
we're going to put a diving board
that's eight kilometers long.
So if I walk all the way up to the edge
of that eight kilometers and look down,
the earth is going to be 10 meters below me
because I started out five,
I went out eight kilometers,
the earth curved away five meters.
The surface here could be 10 meters
below the edge of the diving board.
Okay, well now,
imagine I was going to throw a baseball.
So I'm going to go back to my tower.
I'm going to throw a baseball.
I'm going to throw it really fast.
I'm going to throw it eight kilometers per second.
So that means it's going to reach the edge
of the diving board in a second.
Well, how far will it fall in a second?
Well, it turns out the distance you fall
is one half AT squared.
So A is 9.81.
So we'll just call that 10.
And half of 10 is 5.
So basically in one second,
you're going to fall five meters.
So you started out five meters above the surface.
You went out eight kilometers in a second.
You fell five meters
and you are still five meters above the surface.
Well, what's going to happen the next second?
Well, you're going to go another eight kilometers.
You're going to fall another five meters.
The earth is going to curve away another five meters.
You're still going to be five meters above the surface.
You are in a circular orbit.
What did it take to get into a circular orbit?
You had to go eight kilometers per second horizontal.
Is this a condition of free of zero gravity?
No, you're falling.
The earth is pulling you down.
You are just going so fast forward
that the earth is curving away as fast as you go forward.
So you keep missing the earth, right?
You're falling, but you keep missing the earth
because the earth keeps curving away from you.
That's what allows you to be in a circular orbit.
It's about that horizontal velocity.
So sometimes people talk about centrifugal force stuff.
If anybody tells you about centrifugal force with respect to orbits,
just that's not right.
There's no such thing as a centrifugal force, it turns out.
It's all about the speed.
It's about going fast and so fast you keep missing the earth.
If you don't believe me, check Newton.
If you go into Newton's, you can see Newton's sketch pad
back when he was in his 20s.
He drew little cannonballs being launched from cannons
and showed how you would get into orbit, right?
And there was no centrifugal force concept going on there.
It's just about the velocity and this concept of gravity.
So depending then on how hard I throw the ball,
I'm going to get into a different orbit.
So at any given altitude, there's only one specific velocity
that'll give me exactly a circular orbit.
If I throw it a little faster than that circular orbital velocity,
then I'll be in an elliptical orbit.
If I throw it slower,
then I'll become an intercontinental ballistic baseball
and I'll take out Rio down there.
The shape of this trajectory is actually also an ellipse.
Now they might've told you in high school physics
when you throw basketballs or baseballs or something
that those are parabolic.
They're not, it's an ellipse.
So this is an ellipse that happens to intersect the earth.
If I do in fact throw the ball really, really fast,
then I can enter my own independent orbit around the sun that's different.
I'm no longer tied to the earth
and I'm in my own independent orbit around the sun,
different than the earth, but I don't really go anywhere.
And I used to say, we don't do that.
And then we started doing that.
And as we call that earth trailing orbits now.
Solar observation.
If I want to go somewhere, I got to throw the ball even faster.
So it goes out to the edge of the earth's gravitational sphere of influence
and actually has excess velocity to go somewhere.
We call that hyperbolic excess velocity.
So when NASA launched the Perseverance rover to Mars last week,
it not only had to escape the earth,
they had to escape the earth with extra velocity
that would allow it to go all the way to Mars.
So it left earth on a hyperbolic trajectory.
It then entered an elliptical trajectory around the sun.
And then it's going to encounter Mars again on a hyperbolic trajectory.
And they'll have to fire rockets to inter-orbit.
Well, actually, with rover, they're going to directly enter.
They got a big heat shield.
So they're going to just slam right in the atmosphere.
That's how they'll bleed off all that energy.
And then they'll land on Mars using their complicated sky crane thing
they have worked out.
So no matter what I do, there's only four options.
Circle, ellipse, hyperbola, parabola.
And in reality, you can never get a perfect circle
and you can never get a perfect parabola.
So the only things we'll see is in reality are ellipses and hyperbolas.
And for our business of orbiting around the earth, everything is an ellipse.
Now, a lot of orbits are close enough that we call them circular,
but realize to go out enough decimal places, they're not exactly circular.
So those are our orbit options.
Any questions on that so far?
What it takes to get into orbit?
Are there like orders of magnitude in terms of how much power you need to get out there?
Does it like increase significantly or is it all fairly linear?
That's a really interesting question.
So let me let me tackle that here in a second,
because that's an interesting way to think about it.
So when I'm getting up into orbit, so first of all, I got to launch the ball, right?
So I got to get that ball going fast.
So if I don't get it going quite fast enough, it's going to smash into the earth.
If I have it going just fast enough, it enters a circular orbit.
If I go a little faster, it's going to enter an elliptical orbit.
So as I said, right around the earth, you know, low earth orbit, a couple hundred kilometers up,
we're looking at going about eight kilometers per second.
But when I talked about that racetrack, the bigger the racetrack, the more energy,
and we're talking about mechanical energy here.
The bigger the racetrack, the more energy.
So if I want to go higher, I'm gonna have to throw the baseball harder, right?
So in low earth orbit, I'm going about eight kilometers per second.
But as I go out to higher orbit, let's say all the way to geostationary orbit,
which is 36,000 kilometers away, I'm now only going about three kilometers per second.
Okay, well, where'd the energy go?
Well, this is, it's all potential now, right?
I don't have the same kinetic energy, I have more potential energy,
because it costs me energy to get out there.
I have to spend energy to get higher, right?
And I climb out of that gravity well.
But so that my, so I need to get out to geostationary orbit from low earth orbit,
costs you about four kilometers per second, extra delta V,
to go from low earth orbit all the way to geostationary.
Turns out that's about the same amount as it takes to go to the moon.
To go from low earth orbit to the moon is pi kilometers per second.
So it's 3.14 kilometers per second, give or take.
And then to get into lunar orbit is about another 800 meters per second.
So it's about four kilometers per second to go from low earth orbit to the moon,
about the same as geo.
And going to Mars is only about five and a half.
So it's not exponential. And it's not really linear either.
But one of my favorite science fiction writers, Robert Heinlein once said,
low earth orbit is halfway to everywhere.
If you, it costs you about eight kilometers per second to get into low earth orbit.
If you have another eight kilometers per second available,
you can go anywhere in the solar system eventually, right?
It might take you nine years to get to Pluto, but you'll get there, right?
And so it's all about the gravity, you know.
So, you know, if you live, you know,
there's certain parts of the country and parts of the world,
when you ask people how far something is, they tell you in time, not in distance, right?
So it's all about how you think about it.
So in space, the distance is not so important.
It's about the energy, right?
And we'll use that delta V as our kind of coin of the realm there.
So that delta V then is, you know, depends on the orbit.
And so the low earth orbit is about eight kilometers per second.
As I said, if you go higher, this number goes down.
About three kilometers per second.
So it's all about trading the energy, though.
This is the conservation of mechanical energy.
So just like being on a swing, right?
So when you're going low, you're fast.
And when you're going high, you're slow.
So I'm trading kinetic energy for potential energy here, right?
So at the high point of the orbit, which we call apogee, I'm going slowest.
At the low point, we call perigee, I'm going fastest.
But my total energy is the same.
Energy is conserved.
Energy is a conservative field, which means whatever energy you start with, you end up with.
Which is nice, because that means if I tell you the energy of the orbit,
of the satellite at any one spot, I know it at every spot.
So I don't have to continuously track stuff in orbit.
I really probably couldn't do that, even though I wanted to in a lot of cases.
Which is good news, because that means I only have to track it for a little bit.
And if I know that energy, it's going to be the same all the time.
So that's a big advantage for that.
The other thing that's conserved in my orbit is angular momentum.
So angular momentum is a vector quantity.
So if you wrap your right hand around the direction of the orbit,
it'll tell you the angular momentum vector.
So you can see that in this animation.
What that means is that orbit plane is fixed in space.
The Earth is rotating underneath me, but that plane is fixed with respect to the stars.
So you see that angular momentum vector, that big arrow pointing out there,
that's orthogonal to that orbit plane.
But the plane itself is fixed in space, and the Earth is rotating underneath me.
That's a key thing to try to visualize.
It's hard to imagine something being fixed in space,
but that is because of angular conservation of angular momentum.
And that's important in terms of what I can see when I'm going around.
So as I'm going around, this is animation.
This is not an artist's conception.
This is using a simulation tool called System Toolkit by a company called Analytical Graphics.
We're an educational partner, so that's my advertising for those guys.
But they make a neat tool.
And that tool helps us understand the behavior here.
The circles you see represent different things that I can look at.
So that big circle, that outer circle,
represents everything I can see out to the true horizon.
And this satellite is in a 700-kilometer orbit.
The littler circle represents a field of regard
for what we call an elevation angle of about 60 degrees.
That big circle is an elevation angle of zero degrees,
basically looking along the horizon.
As I go up to about 60 degrees, I get this circle.
And then when I look down with my camera, you see that little itty-bitty soda straw.
That's what I can actually image with my high-resolution camera.
Typically, these high-resolution imagers only have about a degree or so field of view.
That means it's going to take me a long time to image the whole Earth.
So that swath then is telling me how much of the Earth I'm covering on a given pass.
And it's also going to tell me when I can see the satellite,
when the satellite can see me.
These are the opportunities I have to interact with that satellite.
So as that satellite's going over, imagine that we're tracing a line on the Earth, right?
So we're going to call this the ground track.
So as I'm going around the Earth, the yellow there is the equatorial plane, just for reference.
So as I'm going around the Earth, notice that the satellite stays in its plane,
and the Earth is rotating underneath that plane,
which means I'm basically doing like a spiral cut, if you will, of the Earth as I'm going around.
And so if I'm on the ground and I want to see that satellite, I have to wait for it to pass over me,
or think about another way, me to rotate underneath its orbit plane, right?
Depends on how you want to think about it.
And that creates our ground track.
So we have a static map, because it's hard to move a map, so we just have a map.
And we have our guy standing down there in South America.
So when the satellite crosses the equator on its first orbit, let's say,
the person could look over and see the satellite to his east.
Now imagine it's a low Earth orbit satellite, has a period of about 90 minutes.
Now the Earth is going to rotate 22.5 degrees in 90 minutes, 15 degrees an hour.
That means the next time the satellite passes the equator,
from the person's standpoint, the satellite will now be to his west, okay?
So the satellite stayed in the same plane.
The Earth rotated underneath the orbit plane, right?
So and probably the next orbit on the third orbit, it'll be beyond the horizon,
and you won't even be able to see it, right?
So this is telling us when I can access that satellite to, you know,
have it take pictures of me, have me talk to it,
or if I was trying to do something to it, when I could even have that opportunity.
So then different orbits will have different ground tracks.
There's things that we can adjust on the orbit.
We call their orbital elements.
And one of those is the size of the orbit.
And the bigger the orbit, the longer the period,
the longer it takes to go once around the orbit.
So here you see different orbits, A, B, C, D, E.
And notice A has a period of 2.7 hours.
B is a period of 8 hours.
C is a period of 18 hours.
And E is a period of about 24 hours.
Notice what's happening to the ground track.
The ground track is getting scrunched together.
That's our technical term, scrunched.
We're getting scrunched together until I get to orbit D,
which ends up being a figure eight.
So orbit D, the period is about 24 hours.
So we say it is synchronized with the Earth's rotation.
In other words, it is geosynchronous.
Now, A, B, C, D...
A, B, C, and D have the same inclination.
So inclination is the angle of the orbit with respect to the equator,
if you want to think of it that way.
If I was orbiting around the equator, we'd say we have an inclination of zero.
If I was orbiting around the poles, we'd say you have an inclination of 90.
And in the case of A, B, C, and D, they all have an inclination of 50.
And I can tell that by looking at the highest point,
the highest latitude that it reaches.
You see over here the high latitude.
I'm glad it was 50 north, 50 south.
So that's telling me the inclination is about 50 degrees.
And then look what happens to orbit E.
Now I slink the inclination, so it now is going around the equator.
And so now the ground track for orbit E is a dot on the equator.
So it is now stationary with respect to that spot.
So we call it geostationary.
It is orbiting. It's going three kilometers per second,
but it's orbiting at the same rate that the Earth rotates.
So that gives me that perception of it being always over the same spot.
It's orbiting exactly the same rate at which the Earth is rotating,
which is why it seems to hover over that same spot.
But it's going three kilometers per second.
It's not hovering by any means.
So those different ground tracks give me different opportunities
to access the different orbits.
So here's an example.
This is the actual International Space Station.
You can see it going around in orbit, its ground track.
And so you can see the trace it makes on the globe and then the ground track.
So it has an inclination of 51.6 degrees.
That's because they had to launch pieces of it out of Russia.
And the lowest inclination Russia could reach was 51.6
because they launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Would have been easier for us if it had been launched everything from Florida,
but that's another story.
So that's our ground track.
This is the International Space Station.
This is what...
Oh, go ahead.
Can I ask a question about that?
So is it because you're closer to the equator, you get more spin from the Earth?
Is that why Florida is better?
Well, yes, that's a short answer.
So when we were launching everything from the shuttle,
if we were to launch due east from Florida, we get maximum effect of the Earth's rotation.
But because we had to launch from Florida into 51 degrees,
which means we had to go somewhat northeast, we lost capability.
And they ended up having to completely redesign the external tank of the shuttle
to remove 8,000 pounds of weight so that they could get the stuff into orbit.
It's quite a heroic tale we could go into offline.
But it all came...
It's amazing.
So politics drove orbital mechanics, which drove technology.
It was pretty amazing.
But that's the way the world works sometimes.
But yeah, great question.
So here's our geostationary satellites.
So what you'll notice here, a couple of things.
One geostationary satellite cannot see the entire Earth.
In fact, to cover the entire equator, you need three satellites,
and then you get overlapping coverage.
But a geostationary satellite can only see up to about 70 or 80 degrees latitude.
So you end up with this triangle on the North Pole and the South Pole
that a satellite from GEO cannot see.
Or said another way, if I'm on the North Pole,
I can't talk to a satellite in geostationary orbit.
So if you have a direct TV dish,
and you're planning to move into the North Pole to visit Santa Claus,
don't take your TV dish with you.
I don't know what Santa Claus does, but you cannot get direct TV.
So for the most part, we don't care,
because there's not that many... nobody lives up there anyway.
However, there are military missions that do care.
And then we all use a different orbit called ammonia orbit
or highly elliptical orbit that can cover those high latitude regions.
But I didn't include an example of that.
But if you want to talk about that, we can.
So quick overview then.
This is orbital mechanics.
There's how we calculate some of those things.
I had to put in a second order nonlinear vector differential equation
just to see if anybody was paying attention.
But a little bit here of how we solve that equation.
We can talk about in more detail if you want in the break.
But I want to get to operations and then we'll pull up our poll.
So remember, we have these things called mission operation systems,
which are all the people, processes, and things need to do missions.
So we have manufacturing, launch, and things like our mission control center,
which you're used to seeing on TV.
And then we have our communication architectures,
which are all those links that move the data around.
I said space is all about moving the data.
So I have ground stations and control centers and I have relay satellites.
All that's happening to help me move the data.
And I have various methods of doing that.
So there are various networks for helping move that data.
So on the top, we see the Air Force Satellite Control Network,
which I guess could now be called the Space Force Satellite Control Network.
I'll never be able to say that.
And it has sites all around the world they use for talking to satellites.
They talk to, what, about 450 different satellites a day, if I recall.
That's the Air Force network. There's a Navy network. There's an Army network.
There are commercial networks.
There's a commercial network called Universal Space Network.
And they have sites all over the world that you can rent,
basically, by the minute to talk to your satellite.
Then NASA has a deep space network you see there on the bottom.
They have three sites in California, Madrid, and Australia.
And then NASA has something called the Tracking Data Relay Satellite Systems,
which are satellites in geostationary orbit that are used to talk to satellites in low-Earth orbit.
So if you see video coming from the International Space Station,
it's probably coming through TDRS.
So that's how they relay data.
So all of that represents really critical infrastructure.
Without those, you can't run your mission.
You got to have those to talk to your satellite and your satellite to talk to you.
So those are important parts of the problem here.
And then we have various operational activities we have to accomplish.
So there's nine different activities shown in this cartoon.
The one you're probably most used to thinking about is flight control.
You see upper right there, you see people sitting at a console,
you know, with a headset on, you know, managing the mission.
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg, right?
You have people doing planning.
You have people moving the data.
You have people doing tracking, maintenance and support,
spacecraft support, mission data archiving, all that, right?
All of these are things that happen to make operations effective.
And a key part of that is that mission data delivery and data processing, right?
Because it's all about moving the ones and zeros.
And these are expensive ones and zeros, right?
If I'm collecting data on what's happening on Mars,
that's cost me a lot of money to get that data.
So I want to get that data.
So I have to have the data generators in space
and then have the data analyzers on the ground.
And we need to make sure we have the tools in place to do that.
And we have a lot of trade-offs to make in terms of what we do in operations planning.
On one hand, we'd love satellites to just take care of themselves, be 100% autonomous.
On the other hand, we maybe have invested a billion dollars in that satellite.
We don't really want it to just go wandering around the solar system on its own,
you know, without supervision.
So there's a trade between spacecraft autonomy
and how many people we have on the ground.
And people on the ground are expensive.
For every person you have sitting in a seat on a console,
you probably had to hire five people.
Because by the time you, you know, have three shifts a day
and then people take vacations and they need training, you know, it adds up.
So for long-term missions, more than half your mission cost can be in operations.
Was there a question?
Okay.
And then, of course, anomaly response, right?
So if I have a CubeSat that I built, you know, a university built and it has a problem,
you know, I can get around to fixing it next week and nobody's going to care that much.
But if GPS has a problem, I probably need to fix it right now
because we've got, you know, the whole world to pay on.
So that and, you know, understanding the state of health
and understanding the new hardware and software that I'm flying
are all parts of the trade-offs I have to do in mission operations.
So here are the key tasks again,
just as a review of what we have to do in mission operations,
there's nine key tasks and the trade-offs that go with that.
And then these are the takeaways from a cybersecurity lens.
First of all, you know, getting to space is hard, right?
Eight kilometers per second, not easy.
Orbital mechanics inherently limits some of the things we can and can't do for space operations
and when you can even get an opportunity to talk to the satellite.
And finally, there's a lot of things going on in mission operations.
And that creates a fairly large attack surface.
You know, again, people, processes, and things that I can get into
often spread all over the world that I have to be concerned about.
So all of these are important things for us to consider from a cybersecurity and cyberspace lens.
I had a question here, does translation introduce significant orbital effects?
What do you mean by translation?
IRPIN, I don't know how you say your name there.
Can you clarify what you mean by translation in your question?
I'll have to come back to that again.
So it's in the chat, you say, does translation introduce significant orbital effects?
I don't really do that.
Oh, no, you're still there.
IRPIN, if you can, sorry, the Earth's moving around the sun.
No, the Earth is, you know, if I'm in orbit around the sun,
the fact the Earth is moving around the sun does not create any orbital effects on the orbit itself.
Now, the sun can have an impact, gravitational impact on my spacecraft.
We call that a gravitational perturbation.
The moon as well.
So if you see out of geostationary orbit, we have these sun-moon effects that actually impact
the spacecraft's ability to stay within the box that's been assigned.
And so you have to spend a little bit of energy every year to stay within your box,
because if you just leave it alone, the sun and the moon will start to move you outside the box.
And we don't want to be outside the box.
We spend a little energy to do that.
So Matt asked about CubeSat.
So CubeSat was a standard that was invented about 20 years ago
by some folks out at Stanford and Cal Poly.
And these guys, and they're still in business today.
I know the guys.
They just decided one day that they were going to define a CubeSat to be 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters.
They just said, okay, 10 is a nice round number in centimeters.
And so that became a CubeSat standard.
Of course, that's a 1U CubeSat, 10 by 10 by 10.
And you can make 2U, 3U, 9U.
People are doing 26U, at which point you become stupid.
But the nice thing is what happened, it became kind of a self-licking ice cream cone
in that this became a standard size satellite for a tiny little satellite.
And people then created abilities to launch those.
And so now if you want to launch a satellite,
there are a number of companies that will launch CubeSats for you
as long as you follow the CubeSat standard.
And it's usually 1, 2, or 3U is the most common that you see.
And if you stick to that standard, then folks like NanoRacks can get you launched in six months.
And the cost is getting down to the point that it's...
that literally high schools are launching their own satellites.
So it's... and that... it makes, of course,
now we have this massive proliferation of small satellites,
which creates other problems that we'll talk about.
It's really lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of organizations and countries
and even schools to build their own satellites.
And that's obviously a good and a bad thing, depending on who you ask.
Did that answer your question, Matt, on that?
Yeah, yeah, it did. How much... you said it was getting cheap.
How much does it cost to actually launch one?
Launch, I think last time I checked for about a 1U.
And, you know, there's a lot of it depends when it comes to the price tag.
It was in the $50,000 to $100,000 range, I want to say.
And the CubeSat itself, you want to build one that will actually work for, you know,
more than a day, you're going to end up spending $100,000, probably anyway.
So, yeah, a couple hundred K, you can get a reasonable CubeSat
with a payload that actually can do something.
Which, you know, from millions to hundreds of thousands is pretty good.
And you can, from somebody, you might be able to do it cheap.
That's if you actually wanted to do something.
If you just want to build a toy, you can go cheaper than that.
But people are usually going to go to the trouble, they kind of want it to work.
That was cool, thank you, that was perfect.
All right, let's pull up the poll here.
Let me launch the poll.
While I launch the poll, if anybody has any other questions,
I guess that's some good ones there.
So go ahead and answer the poll and then we'll,
if you don't have any other questions, we'll start up in about five minutes.
So take the poll, take a stretch.
And then when we come back, we're going to focus on threats.
So we'll look at the natural environment and the human environment in terms of threats.
So if you thought you wanted to be an astronaut, be ready to be disappointed.
Any questions?
Is there a question?
All right, so we'll start up again in a minute or two.
All right, getting there with all the poll answers.
I'll just give you another minute or so and then we'll
review that and then start into our next topic.
All right, let's see where we ended up.
All right, so how fast you need to be going?
Eight kilometers per second.
Not 8,000 kilometers per second, that'd be pretty dang fast.
Not the speed of light for sure.
The speed of light is how fast you'd have to be going to go into orbit around a black hole.
But to orbit the Earth, you only need to go on eight kilometers per second.
Can you see any ALEO satellite from any spot on Earth at any time?
No, no, you can't.
So again, the key there was low Earth orbit satellite because low is pretty low, as we're
going to see.
And so you can only see it certain times of the day, maybe only a couple of times a day,
depending on where you are.
A geostationary satellite definitely cannot see every spot on Earth.
You can only see about a third or so of the Earth at any given time, not even quite a third.
So that means we need multiple geosatellites to provide full coverage.
So if a bad guy wants an opportunity to covertly contact your satellite, they're going to have
to wait until that satellite passes over them.
Now they could bounce something through another ground station anywhere.
But if I'm trying to do it directly, I have to wait for it to pass overhead.
And then opportunities to threaten space ops, all of the above.
Everybody got that.
So pretty big threat surface there that we have to concern ourselves with.
So good stuff.
All right.
So who wants to be an astronaut here?
Who wants to be an astronaut?
What if I could just... you didn't have to go through all the training.
I would just get you into space.
Yeah, sounds great.
All right.
Well, after we go through this section, let's see if that's still the case.
All right, so here we're going to look at threats.
We're going to look at natural threats and man-made threats.
As we're going to see, the natural threats are bad enough.
And we don't need to give me human threats because we've got enough to deal with, it turns out.
So we want to look at both kinds, though.
And the natural threats especially are important because about a quarter of all anomalies
in spacecraft experience are a direct result of the natural environment.
So you can read all the different things that have happened over the years to different satellites
because of the natural environment.
There was a radiation storm that affected the STEREO satellites.
There was a coronal mass ejection that impacted the Dawn satellite when it was orbiting Ceres.
The Galaxy 15 one is interesting because, again, this was having to do with electrostatic
discharge because of a solar flare.
And that satellite lost its mind.
It was wandering around geostationary orbit out of control.
Some people on the ground could not send it any commands, but it was broadcasting.
It was on and it was broadcasting.
So it was interfering both physically and RF to other satellites.
Other satellites had to actually get out of the way of it.
And then eventually, it kind of accidentally pointed away from the sun and the battery
discharged and it did kind of a control-alt-delete and reset itself.
And then it was fine.
So that was a crazy one.
And then this animation in the top here, you see an impact of this is a collision between
two satellites.
One is a dead satellite, one is a live satellite.
And that caused a whole bunch of debris.
So these are all just issues that come up because of the space environment.
Because space is dangerous, and you got a lot to worry about up there.
So no beans on the space station.
Just keep that in mind.
Don't fart in a space suit.
But so where's space?
It turns out space is not very far away.
So about 100 kilometers, 60 miles straight up, if you could drive straight up.
There's something called the carbon line that kind of defines, you know, a generally
accepted beginning of space.
But there really is no internationally defined exactly where space begins.
In fact, if you're only at 100 kilometers, you couldn't stay in orbit because there's
just too much drag.
I need to be at least another 20 miles further before you can even have a hope of staying
in orbit very long.
And really, you want to be even higher than that.
So if any of you bought your tickets to ride on Virgin Galactic, I guess it's going to
be early next year now, 200,000 bucks, you're going to get a ride to space.
And they're going to define space as 100 kilometers.
So you're not going to go into orbit, you're going to go up and come down.
But hey, 200,000 bucks, you know, trillionaires, there you go.
So space isn't that far away.
So if you imagine the Earth were the size of a peach, the International Space Station
is just above the fuzz.
So the fuzz represents the atmosphere.
It's just a little fuzz.
And we're not that high up.
I mean, we're like right there.
In fact, it's not even a scale in that picture because it's too hard to draw it that close.
Really, really, really close.
That's to get to space.
Now, once I get in space, space is really, really, really big.
You know, so to try to put those distances in perspective, we tried to put some things
to scale here.
So imagine the sun were the size of a house, then the Earth is the size of a baseball.
So roughly what, about 8 centimeters or so in diameter, 10 centimeters in diameter.
But it's 1.2 kilometers away or, you know, three-fourths of a mile away.
That's how far away we are from the sun.
And the moon is the size of a large marble, about an inch in diameter.
And it's 10 feet away or three meters away.
And this is the one I have trouble wrapping my head around because, you know, you look
at the moon at night, it seems closer than that.
It seems bigger than that.
But it's really just optical illusion and how our brain processes stuff.
So the moon, you know, get a baseball and a marble out sometime and pace off the distance
and you'll just, you won't believe it, but it's true.
I've re-ran the numbers many times and that's how it works out.
And then you go to Pluto and Pluto is, you know, 20, almost 30 miles away.
And again, about the size of a marble, 30 miles away from the sun.
So, you know, the size of the solar system is a little hard for us to grasp really.
So huge distances involved here.
But once I get out to those distances, once I'm out there in space, there's a lot of nasty
stuff I have to worry about.
So there's six main things that we worry about.
Gravitational environment, the atmosphere or lack thereof and being in a vacuum,
the debris environment, and then radiation and charged particles.
So I'm not going to say much about the gravitational environment.
That tends to be a bigger issue for fluid handling and especially for humans.
But we're going to focus on the things that are the biggest threats to spacecraft,
which are all the other things.
So let's start with atmosphere, drag, and atomic oxygen.
In low Earth orbit, there's still a little bit of drag,
and there's still a little bit of atmosphere that's going to slow me down.
The atmosphere basically is like friction.
When I'm starting a spacecraft, it's going to rob energy from my orbit.
Remember I said the bigger the orbit, the more energy.
So if I take energy out of the orbit, the orbit gets smaller.
We're getting smaller.
Eventually it gets so small that I re-enter the atmosphere completely.
That atmosphere decreases exponentially with altitude.
Come visit us here in Colorado and get off the plane,
and you'll know immediately that the atmosphere has decreased a bit from sea level.
The atmosphere doesn't go completely away ever.
Well, not ever, but it goes up to...
NASA detected molecules of the atmosphere up to about out by the moon,
but those are like molecules they detected.
So in terms of low Earth orbit, we use 600 kilometers as kind of a rough rule of thumb.
In other words, if we're below about 600 kilometers,
then atmosphere drag is something we probably have to worry about.
If we're above 600, then probably it's nothing we need to worry about.
But again, it's not hard and fast, it's just roughly.
Because when I look at that drag equation there on the left,
the drag that I get from a satellite depends on a number of things.
One of the things it depends on is the velocity, how fast I'm going,
the drag coefficient, basically the shape,
and then the cross-sectional area of the spacecraft.
So I know most of those things.
What I don't know very well is the density,
because that density of the atmosphere changes day and night.
It changes with season, it changes with latitude,
and it changes based on what mood the sun happens to be in.
And the sun goes through these 11-year cycles of moods,
at least as long as we've been watching it, which isn't that long, really.
But so far, it's 11 years as far as we can tell.
And we're actually just coming off the latest solar minimum.
So the sun is always putting out these charged particles I'm going to talk about,
and we call the solar wind.
So these charged particles are always coming out from the sun.
And think of that as a constant breeze coming from the sun.
But the sun is going to get more active, less active over this 11-year cycle.
Right now, we're just coming off the solar min,
about ready to start back into the next high part of the cycle.
When the sun is not very active, the atmosphere contracts,
which means there's less drag.
When the sun is fairly active, the atmosphere expands, which means there's more drag.
So we've been going through a period of relatively low drag.
We're starting our period of relatively high drag over the next six to eight years.
In addition, when UV light hits oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere,
they break apart into atomic oxygen.
Individual atoms of oxygen, which are very reactive.
Oxygen by itself, as you know, is very reactive.
That's why things rust.
But when I have atomic oxygen, it's even more reactive,
and that can cause damage to the surface of your satellite.
So these are issues of simply the atmosphere.
Again, generally issues below about 600 kilometers.
The International Space Station is at 400 kilometers.
So yeah, it has to worry about this stuff.
If we didn't do anything to the International Space Station,
at solar maximum, the International Space Station would re-enter in about three months.
At solar minimum, which is where we've been, it'll re-enter in a couple of years.
But it's a big difference between maximum and minimum in terms of how that impacts drag.
But for the most part, space sucks.
We're in a vacuum.
Because we're in a vacuum, we have other things to worry about.
One of the things we have to worry about is called outgassing.
So if you have a soda bottle, you shake up the soda bottle and open up the top,
you're going to hear the fizz.
Well, what's happening?
You're releasing pressure and the gas is escaping.
So the dissolved gas in the liquid is escaping because of the released pressure.
Same thing can happen in space with materials.
So if I have polymers or adhesives or anything like that,
they tend to, during manufacturing, they'll have alcohols and other
volatiles that'll get stored in there.
When I release the pressure, those things will come off.
We call that outgassing.
And in space, there's one really important law that governs everything we do,
and that's called Murphy's Law.
If you're from England, it's called Sod's Law.
Don't ask me why they're different.
But the laws are different, the guy's different, the law's the same.
And Murphy's or Sod's Law says that anything that can happen will happen
at the worst possible time.
And the corollary to that in space for outgassing is that outgassing will go
wherever you don't want it to go, which is probably on the surface of your
mirror or sensor or things like that.
We also worry about offgassing inside where the crew lives,
because the crew has to smell everything.
You know, if you ever bought a new car, then a car smells like a new car.
Well, what's new car smell?
It's outgassing plastic, right?
Now in your car, you simply roll down the window and you don't have to smell it
anymore.
But if I'm at the International Space Station and I have a smell like that,
I can't roll down the window, right?
There's not, that's not going to work for me.
So that becomes a hazard for astronauts.
They want to make sure they don't have anything smelly like that,
meaning they'll off-gas plastics or things like that.
We can also get cold welding in a vacuum.
This is where two pieces of metal can literally get fused together because we
get a weak molecular bond between the two pieces.
We can get tin whiskers that can form on tin solder, which is why we like to
have a bit of lead in the solder so we don't do that in space because that
crystallization can cause a failure of solder joints.
And probably the most problematic thing for being in a vacuum in space has to do
with heat transfer.
There are three ways to move heat, convection, conduction, radiation.
Convection is what's keeping you cool here in your room, air blowing around you.
Conduction, you feel when you stir your coffee with a metal spoon.
And then radiation is what you feel when you actually feel the heat coming off
a fire.
Well, in a vacuum, I can't conduct anything.
I don't have any air blowing around me.
So the only way heat's getting in and the only way heat's getting out of my
satellite is through radiation.
So you see on the right there, the bottom right, you see the radiator panels on
the International Space Station.
So they use ammonia loops.
So the ammonia flows around where the astronauts live, carries the heat, goes
through those panels where it is radiated into space.
And then it cools off the ammonia, and then the ammonia does another trip back
through where the astronauts live.
So we do testing in space using these chambers you see at the top, a thermal
vacuum chamber, to make sure we know how things will behave, spacecraft will
behave when we get up there into space.
So that thing on the front of your car that cools your engine, what's that
called?
What do you call that thing in the front of your engine that cools your engine?
Radiator.
Radiator.
How does it cool your engine?
Heat transfer.
Yeah, convective heat transfer, not radiative heat transfer.
That thing should be called a convector.
I'm on a campaign to change its name, because I'm tired of people calling it a
radiator.
It's a convector, right?
You're pumping fluid around the engine block, and then air blows over the vanes
and cools the fluid.
That is not radiation.
That is convection, my friend.
By the next time you go by, make sure you buy the convector fluid, not the
radiator fluid.
It's a little more expensive, but it's more precise.
Anyway, so that's an issue with being in a vacuum.
Another issue being in space is all the junk.
So here's the history of the junk.
It's important to note that each of those little blobs are not to scale.
So we're up to 20,000 objects.
In space that we're currently tracking.
So this is the box score.
This comes out quarterly, so this is the last one that came out.
So we're just over 20,000 objects.
Nancy, that's from AGI.
I think I got that off of YouTube.
You could Google it.
They may even have a newer one.
They put a new one out every once in a while, because you notice that one's about
four years old.
But 20,000 objects that are 10 centimeters or bigger.
So think softball size or bigger.
And that's a limit of what we're able to track.
So we have tracking capabilities on the ground.
So the U.S. Space Force is now in charge of keeping track of that.
We have a satellite space surveillance network of satellite of ground systems that track
that radar systems.
And currently the limit is about 10 centimeters in low Earth orbit and about beach ball size
out of geostationary orbit.
That capability is about ready to change.
The Space Force is about ready to bring operational a thing called the space fence, which means
they'll be able to track things smaller.
How much smaller depends.
But people are saying what's going to happen is that number is going to change by a lot,
maybe by an order of magnitude.
Just because we'll be able to see things that now we know we're sure are there, but
we can't see them.
So now we are blissfully ignorant.
But then we'll be able to start seeing them and we can't be blissfully ignorant anymore.
So now instead of 20,000 objects to see, we'll have 200,000 or more that we'll have to keep
track of.
And that just keeps continuing to proliferate.
There have been numerous satellites damaged by debris and numerous other satellites.
Maneuvering to avoid debris has become fairly routine.
Every time I have to move my satellite, I'm spending propellant that I'm never going to
get back.
It's interesting, you look at geostationary, we once worked out what propellant is worth
at geostationary orbit.
Because a geostationary satellite makes like $100 million a year revenue.
If you work out what the propellant is worth per gram, it's more expensive than plutonium.
I mean, it's way more expensive than gold.
It's more expensive than plutonium.
So if I have to spend some of those precious grams of propellant, I'm not going to be happy.
I'm going to have to dodge a piece of junk, you know what I'm saying?
But that's the situation that we're dealing with.
But the big dog in space is the sun.
So the sun is putting out a number of things we have to pay attention to.
First of all is electromagnetic radiation.
So the physicists, you know, they use this word radiation, and they're not always clear
about what they mean.
So I'm going to distinguish between electromagnetic radiation and ionizing radiation, aka charged
particles.
So for electromagnetic radiation, we mean light and heat, right?
And all across the electromagnetic spectrum, literally from X-rays and gamma rays all the
way up the radio waves.
You see the graph up there of the output of the sun.
Most of the sun's output at EM, not too amazingly, is right in the middle of the visible.
And that's a function of Wien's law, it turns out.
But you see, this is actually Planck's law plotted there.
But the peak of that curve is right in the middle of the visible.
Which is convenient for us because that's what we can see.
But the range is all the way from X-rays all the way up to radio waves.
So the infrared, of course, is going to cause heating.
The light we can turn into solar energy.
Ultraviolet can cause damage of our surfaces.
We can get radio interference from the sun.
The sun is actually very noisy from a radio standpoint.
And we actually get solar pressure.
Force from the sun, from light.
So light is made up of waves or particles.
Depending on what mood you happen to be in when you do the experiment.
And if it's a particle, we call that a photon.
Now, photons do not have mass.
Turns out they don't have volume either.
But they do have momentum.
That's a quantum thing.
So a photon can actually transfer momentum to you.
And it's not much.
It's like five newtons per square kilometer.
But if I have big old solar rays hanging out for my satellite,
that can be significant over time.
And if I had a really big sail, I could literally sail around the solar system,
harnessing the pressure of light as I did that.
So I have to worry about that.
But probably the bigger worry are the charged particles.
So by charged particle, I have to go back to the definition of an atom.
If you guys remember the Bohr model of an atom,
where in the nucleus you have a proton and electron.
Proton being positive and then the electron being negative.
Going around the outside there and the neutron neutral.
And you probably know the story about the two atoms.
Two atoms were walking down the road.
One fell down and his buddy helped him back up and said, are you sure?
Or he said, are you okay?
He says, no, I think I lost an electron.
He said, are you sure?
He said, yeah, I'm positive.
So that's how you know you lost an electron.
And neutron walked into a bar and the bartender said, for you, no charge.
Bartender said, we don't serve faster than light particles in here.
The tachyon walked into a bar.
So think about that one.
So I got these charged particles.
I have ions, which are positively charged.
And then I have electrons or negative.
And they're coming from the solar wind, which I said,
there's this constant breeze coming off the sun.
And then occasionally I get these big solar particle events.
It's like a gust of these charged particles.
I also get them coming from outside the solar system.
We call those galactic cosmic rays.
And then I get them concentrated in the Van Allen radiation belts
in the Earth's magnetic field.
So I kind of can't escape these things.
And if you're watching that video on the bottom,
you're seeing the sensors on the SOHO satellite start sort of fizzed out there
when it got hit by a big solar particle event.
So it affected the sensor there.
So these charged particles come in kind of two flavors.
But we're going to worry about low energy and the high energy.
Stuff and the low energy we'll call plasma.
So the plasma effects having to do with arcing,
the plasma effects are mainly going to be on the surface.
So arcing, electrostatic discharge, electromagnetic interference,
and re-attracting of contaminants.
Mostly this is going to be a problem at a geo, less so at LEO,
and mainly on the surface.
So this is an annoyance, but not something that's going to really be a big problem.
I just noticed Pete's question there.
Can an entire orbit be taken out with debris?
We're almost there.
You see that there were some popular orbits there,
geostationary, you actually see a ring.
And then in low Earth orbit, especially the sun synchronous orbits,
they're getting so popular that there's a lot of debris built up there.
Not to the point that that orbit is unusable,
but there's certainly more debris in some orbits than others.
That's for sure.
So thanks for that question, Pete.
Probably the most problematic issue has to do with the high energy charged particles.
And so every once in a while, the sun burps out a big bunch of charged particles
in a coronal mass ejection, shown in this animation in the upper right there.
Luckily, most of the time, it's not aimed at us.
But if it is, we got to be ready.
So we get this big coronal mass ejection, all these big gusts of charged particles.
Lucky for us, we have our shields up.
So our Earth's magnetic field protects us from that big blob of charged particles,
deflecting most of it.
But some of those charged particles get trapped within the field lines.
And then they go down and interact at the field generators,
where the Klingons always target down there,
and interact at the poles where the field lines come together
and cause excitation of the atmosphere, which causes the glow,
which is the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights.
Now, for our spacecraft, those charged particles, those high energy ones,
are going to go whipping through the surface of our satellite,
like it's not even there, and go right through our electronics.
And if it happens to hit the right spot,
if the little bullet happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,
then it can cause a latch up of one of the transistors on your microprocessor.
It can affect the ability for your semiconductor to carry charge.
And all that can have problems in terms of how your system's going to behave.
So there's immediate effects here we call single event phenomenon.
And they happen like that.
I mean, they're like little bullets going in
all the time that are causing issues with how our system is going to behave.
It can flip a bit, it can latch up a part of a transistor.
And there's sort of two effects here.
I think of them in terms of sunburn and skin cancer.
So the sunburns happening today, skin cancer is happening over many years.
So you get an immediate effect, and then you get a,
we call it total dose effect of accumulative degradation,
the ability for our semiconductor to actually work.
So at some point, it simply stops working after some number of months or years,
depending on the substrate material and depending on the orbit that I'm in.
That total dose then eventually causes my system to simply shut down, stop working.
And we can look for materials that are less susceptible,
but eventually everything succumbs.
We have not found a system that is 100%, you know,
unless you go back to iron core memory,
anything that's a semiconductor is eventually going to succumb,
at least as far as the technology we know now.
So we can use some shielding.
People usually guess lead is the best shielding,
but it turns out that's not the best.
It turns out hydrogen is the best shielding,
but hydrogen is not very convenient.
Water would be next best, but if I have humans on board,
I probably have water anyway, so that's good.
On the International Space Station, they actually use polyethylene,
high density polyethylene, a couple of inches of that.
The polyethylene is a hydrocarbon, so there's a lot of hydrogen there.
That's the hydrogen that acts as the shield for them.
But whatever I do, I have to build in air detection and correction
because this stuff is going to happen.
I mean, it's just price of doing business in space.
So I have to have some quite a bit of software overhead
to be constantly checking for these problems
because they're just going to happen.
So the natural environment's bad enough.
Now I got to worry about the unnatural environment, the human environment.
And these were the good old days.
The good old days, we just launched satellites and we talked to them
and everybody was cool and everybody was nice to each other
and we didn't have to worry and we barely had any software anyway,
so it didn't matter.
And that life was good.
That ain't the way it is anymore, right?
Now we have bad actors.
We're way more dependent on software.
And these bad actors are doing things like spoofing and eavesdropping
and denials of service.
All of these are things that we now have to be concerned about.
But we're not really prepared in the space industry.
So we have some challenges in our industry.
First of all, as we've just seen,
some of the problems that can happen in spacecraft
are hard to distinguish between a natural problem and an unnatural problem.
If I have a single event upset,
it may not immediately be obvious that that's, you know,
because of the natural environment or because somebody hacked me.
Also, space has suffered from a bit of, you know,
it-can't-happen-here mentality, you know,
where you tend to think we're, you know,
nobody's going to bug us, but, you know, we're special.
But of course, we're not that special.
And space has tended to be fairly conservative and flexible
and very non-agile in terms of adapting over time.
A bit complacent, we could say.
And we tended to view security as more of an afterthought than a forethought.
And part of it is because fixing things is difficult.
We can patch our systems.
We can even do, you know, new software updates.
But we're limited.
Basically, we can't change our hardware.
And we're limited in the ability of what we can do even to our software.
So we just can't react that fast.
The other issue is that the, you know, the attack surface just keeps growing.
We're relying more and more on software.
We have more and more distributed missions.
We have a lot more actors involved.
We have... our software tends to be more outdated,
because we in the space business tend to build missions that last sometimes for decades.
And so we're still using software from, you know, that nobody else has even heard of.
And then we have trouble, you know, removing that software at end-of-life kind of problems.
So that's the space environment issues.
Again, space isn't that far away.
We have a number of natural environment things we have to contend with.
Big one from upsetting spacecraft standpoint are the high energy charge particles,
which will cause a single event upsets and bit flips and things.
And from a cyber's perspective, what I want you to take away here that,
first of all, again, space is hard.
And space sucks because it's vacuum.
So it's hard enough to get things to work in space, you know, even on a good day,
because that natural environment is a pretty big threat.
And it's causing denial of service randomly already, you know, without any human intervention.
And some of those anomalies that could occur if, you know, if there was a nefarious actor,
we'd have a hard time immediately discerning the difference between
a natural attack and an unnatural attack.
And the other thing to take away is just how fragile spacecraft are, you know,
relatively minor hack, like, you know, causing a solar array not to point quite at the sun,
even if it was off by a few degrees, would decrease the amount of power it could produce,
which might decrease its ability to do its mission,
and on any number of things from a relatively smart area.
So Gretchen's asking a question here, in the vein of threats, human actions,
there are so many vulnerabilities to ground system, the support space that can be attacked.
What would cybersecurity hack look like in the ground infrastructure?
What would they get? And how could you protect against it?
We're going to tackle some more of that here in a minute.
Gretchen, thanks for that question.
But we're, as we saw in that previous section, there's, I listed nine different activities
for mission operations, and any one of those activities is a potential inroads for an attack.
And that, in terms of that, and because they all represent parts of the ground infrastructure
as well. And, you know, some of them more vulnerable than others, but
any one of those are potential inroads, because you have people, processes, and things
involved. And people can be a weak area there, and sometimes just the infrastructure we have,
because it's maybe antiquated or doesn't have the, you know, and we're running, you know,
legacy software from decades ago, we have more vulnerabilities in that respect.
So hopefully that answered your question.
So let's check in. Any other questions from that section before I pop up the poll?
So who still wants to be an astronaut after seeing the threats?
Who's changed their mind? Oh, Pete, you're still ready to go. Okay.
Wear your lead underwear. Oh, wait, I guess you better wear your hydrogen underwear.
Take a visit over an extended stay. Kilt. Okay, you're, yeah, that'll help you.
So astronauts will tell you, because we didn't really talk about human issues, but I mean,
it's scary to talk about what happens to humans, especially in the free fall environment. That's,
that's, that can be pretty bad. The astronauts will tell you they'll see flashes of light
in their eyes. So a charged particle goes through the eyeball, releases a photon, your retina can
detect a single photon. And they see these little light bulbs going off in their eyes at random
times, which is a bit of a freak out. So that's, that's an issue. We talked about shielding.
The, the, again, for human missions, we can use water. In fact, NASA talks about using,
creating like a storm shelter because these big solar particle events luckily don't last that long,
you know, days. So if you can get astronauts to hunker down underneath bags of water for a couple
of days, they'd probably be okay. But the radiation effects on humans is pretty, pretty critical to
look at because a round trip mission to Mars is a, is a lifetime dosage. NASA sets the dosage
limits based on age and gender. Women can take less dosage than men and older people can take
more dosage than younger people. So of course, the answer for going to Mars is to send old men
because you won't miss us anyway. And then you could argue about whether you should even bring
us back. So in terms of a safety issue, but there you go. Yeah. And so Terry's talking,
she, Terry, you want to say something about that JPL thing? Yeah, sure. So a couple of years ago,
JPL was hacked and they were hacked because there was a, an unattended, unauthorized little
Raspberry Pi, just a simple little computer hooked up to their network. And so an external
threat actor got in, actually came in through that Raspberry Pi or targeted it, was able to
crawl around their network for about 10 months and, and received about 500 meg of data about one
of the Mars missions. So that's just an example where, you know, you've really got to watch the
people in your network and what they are putting on your network. Yeah. And I guess be conscious
that, you know, all it takes is one slip up and somebody's just waiting for that slip up, you know,
in that case. You talk about gravity effects on humans. So quickly, there's three things with
gravity effects on humans, moans, groans, and stones. So the moans come from vestibular issues
where you just are space sick and you feel like crap because you're, you're just, you know,
motion sick. Bones comes from a lack of, you know, you know, force on your, on your bones,
so your bones lose, lose, lose mass. And, and then stones come from a fluid shift because you
get fluid that moves to your upper body because your, your legs keep pushing fluid into your
upper body, even though it doesn't need to. And you're, and you, you start offloading
liquid, which means you're going to be dehydrated, which can lead to kidney stones.
So all of that are issues with gravitational effects. Building rotating space stations would
be cool, but the, you know, you look at the mass of the entire International Space Station, you'd
need a couple times more of that mass to build something even close to big enough to be useful.
Because if it's a relatively small radius, people would just throw up if they're going around in
circles like that. So you need a pretty big radius. And I can't remember what the minimum radius is.
Somebody's studied that. But it's, it's like 50 meters or at least before otherwise you just
you the Coriolis would give you all kinds of vestibular issues. So it needs to be a pretty
big thing. So now we're not quite ready to build something that big yet. That'd be nice though.
All right, let me release the pole. Release the hounds. Release the pole. So we just did threats.
So let's go ahead and take this poll. And then we'll give you about five minutes or so to take
the poll. Then we'll review that we got time for a little stretch break. And then we'll
start back up at the at the bottom of the hour. So that should be 4.30 pacific time. And
all right. Yeah. And then so I guess my little has scheduled. That's good.
So we'll start back up at 4.30 pacific time. And then we'll pick up with vulnerabilities there in
a minute. So go ahead and take the poll. And then we'll check in and see how everybody did with that.
All right, let's see how we did here. So we have results.
So first question. Space is incredibly, amazingly, ridiculously far, far away.
Nope, pretty close, right? 100 kilometers. Drag affects all satellites in every orbit.
I guess you missed that one. So no, right? Remember we said 600 kilometers was under the
rule of thumb there. So we're above 600, then I don't need to worry about drag.
Below 600, then yeah, I do need to worry about drag. So maybe I misspoke there and
confused you on that one. So I said, yeah, there's atmosphere all the way up to the moon,
but not enough to worry about. But the 600 kilometers is sort of the line in the sand
there for us. So those bit flips are caused by the high energy charged particles are pretty
pretty much got that one. And yeah, the scary thing here is anomalous behavior by satellite
could be indistinguishable from a natural threat. So it's really hard to know right at first.
And then all of the above represent the cybersecurity challenges that we talked about.
And then key things there for denial of service was the TOS flood, the Internet of Things botnet
attack, and then ping flood type issues. So most of you did okay on there. All right.
So let me stop sharing that. So let's move to our last section. And then you want to stay tuned
because we're going to have our little cybersecurity challenge here at the end to see
how you do. So here we want to look at some specific areas of vulnerability, the RF systems
and data handling systems. So we're going to look at those pipes and those uplink and downlink pipes
that we talked about. We want to know how those pipes work. How do I set up a pipe? And that means
how do I maybe disrupt the pipe as well? So these pipes are fine-tuned things. We need to make sure
that they work correctly because it's all about moving the data. And then we'll look at the data
handling system. So I've got my little cartoon there of a computer and we've got some ones and
zeros there. If you stare carefully there, you see that my artist put a two in there. So I guess
that's a bit flip when that happened. So let's start with a communication system. So this is
the ears and the mouth of our spacecraft. So we have to listen for commands coming up from the
ground and we have to talk to send telemetry down to the ground. Along the way, we have to
turn that data into modulated information that goes on to the carriers we'll talk about. So we
have modulators and demodulators that work with that carrier signal that we'll look at to actually
move that data from where it needs to go. And then that data then connects up to the data handling
system as we'll see here in a little bit. So the key part here is these communication
architectures. So again, it's all about moving the data. So I have ground systems all
over the place. I showed you those Air Force Satellite Control Network and Deep Space Network
and that Universal Space Network. We have these ground stations all over the darn place
and we're moving data all over between them. Now, space to space and ground to space,
downlinks are going to be RF. And once it's on the ground, then we can move things around through
fiber. Fiber is actually a lot better than RF for a whole lot of reasons. But for space,
ain't no fiber up to the space, at least yet, until we can build that space elevator.
We're kind of stuck with RF links. And so that they create their own challenges and vulnerabilities
as we're going to see. So let's talk about how RF communication works, which means we have to
talk about how communication works. And I'm sure everybody, when they were a kid, got to play with
two cans and a string. And kind of unlike the cartoon in the top, the string needs to be tight.
So our scientists, they're not holding the string tight the way they need to, but for, you know,
artistic license there. So the guy on the right is going to talk into his cup and that's going to,
his voice is going to bounce on the bottom of the can and his voice will then get modulated
onto the string. Now the string is going to carry that vibration to the other person who's got the
cup up to her ear, and it's going to bounce on the bottom of her cup, where it'll be demodulated,
and then she's going to hear kind of whatever it was that he said. Okay. So RF communication,
the only difference is no string. In fact, it's really, it's the carrier that acts as the string,
as the carrier is where we're going to modulate our information onto. But we have to have that
carrier. So we have to have that string that goes from me to you, and that's how we're going to get
our information there. Now it turns out there's various ways to modulate that information onto
the carrier. In the space business, we tend to use digital communication, and there's three basic
ways you can think of to do modulation, two of which you have in your car, amplitude modulation
and frequency modulation. So our cartoon there shows a simple example of amplitude modulation,
where low amplitude means a zero, and higher amplitude means a one. I could do frequency
modulation, so every time I shifted frequency, that could be a zero or a one. In the space
business, we tend to use phase modulation, where every time we swap phase, we can go between a zero
and a one. So, you know, kind of pick your language, really. It turns in space, it turns
out that phase modulation is a little more forgiving, so we tend to use that more in space,
but there's, we could use the others if we wanted to, we just don't, they don't work as well. But
for, you know, for your car, it's fine, you know, we're fine. So various ways to do that. Now,
what we're trying to make sure happens is that we can have a conversation, right, between the
spacecraft and the ground, they need to have a conversation. And that conversation is no different
from what you, the conversation you want to have with your buddies when you're out, you know, out
at the restaurant or bar at night, back when we could go to restaurants and bars. Well, I'm sure
most of you remember being in a bar at one time in your life, and you're trying to have a
conversation with somebody on the other side. And there's a lot of things that we're going to
complicate that. First of all, you and your, whoever you're talking to, is helpful if you're
speaking the same language, right? If you're trying to speak to someone in a language they
don't understand, it doesn't matter how loud you talk. Most, well, of course, Americans know that
if you talk English loud enough, anywhere on earth, people will understand you. But that's not
usually the case. So we need to make sure we pick the right language. And we also need to be on the
right frequency. You know, so if I'm, if I'm using, you know, dog whistle frequency, you're not going
to hear me, right? So we, you know, let's pick with audio frequencies here. Distance is important.
If I'm too far away, you can't hear me. And data rate is important. If I talk too quickly,
you can't really understand me. You might hear me, but you won't really understand me.
So I have those things to play with. Language, frequency, distance, data rate, and then
environment. So if somebody's making a lot of noise, then I'm not going to be able to hear what
the other person's saying either. So all those things have to be balanced to make sure we have
effective communication. And what we're really after here is making sure that the signal is
greater than the noise. If the signal is higher than the noise, then you're probably going to
hear me. If the noise is greater than the signal, then you're probably not going to hear me.
And this gets tied up into what we call Fry's equation, which is for how we calculate
link budgets on all of these various links I just showed you. So it looks like a little
complicated equation, but it's really not that bad, because what it's really doing is implementing
the things that we just talked about. So instead of being in a bar having a conversation, now I'm
having a conversation between two dishes, as we show there on the bottom right. And so the same
things apply. I have to pick the right frequency, in this case the frequency of our carrier wave.
I have to pick the right language, which is the modulation. I'm worried about distance, which we
call space loss. I'm worried about the data rate. And I'm worried about noise. So all of those are
things I have to consider. And they're all packed into that equation there at the top. Because what
we're trying to do is ensure that for every bit, the energy is greater than the noise. So we call
energy per bit to noise ratio, or EB over NO. So energy per bit to noise ratio wants to be greater
than one. And that's going to be determined by a number of things. I have only a number of things
I can play with. Transmitter power, basically how loud I'm going to talk. Transmitter gain, how I
maybe direct what I say. The space loss, how close I am. The receiver antenna gain, how big the ears
are on the ground. And the data rate. The lower the data rate, the easier it is to get the message
through. So there are not that many knobs I can turn here. But these are the things that I have
to have all in place to make sure I have effective communication. So if I were to impact any one of
these in some negative way, I'm going to reduce my ability to communicate significantly. And we see
that already with things like Voyager. So Voyager keeps going and going and going. Energizer bunny,
right? Eventually the power on its radioisotope thermoelectric generator is going to give out,
I think, in about 20 years, they said. But even now, it's so far away, the space losses
are basically killing our ability to hear it. In fact, I don't think we're going to be able to hear
it in about another five or 10 years. Already, its signal is below the noise. And it has to keep
repeating itself over and over and over before we can finally pick the signal out of the noise.
But for something in low Earth orbit, we can't have it just keep repeating itself.
We want to hear it the first time if we can. So these are challenges that we have to face.
And the other challenges have to do with the limitations that we have for building up these
links. We have some physical limits that have to do with the atmosphere. So certain frequencies are
going to get attenuated by the atmosphere, especially some of the higher frequencies
that don't like going through rain very well. There's some technical limits in terms of just
how big of an antenna you can put on a satellite. But the biggest antennas flying right now are
about 15 meters. It's just hard to put in and that has to fold up like an origami and then unfold.
The Galileo spacecraft we show there in the illustration at the top, they went to Jupiter
back in the 90s. It had this high gain antenna that was supposed to unfurl like an umbrella,
but two of the ribs got stuck together. They think it was cold welding. So they could never
unfurl that high gain antenna. So they had to run the whole mission on the low gain antenna,
which they lost something like an order or two orders of magnitude less data rate
to be able to run the mission, which is problematic. So just by affecting that one
thing, you've impacted the mission greatly in terms of its ability to move data.
And of course, there's other technical limits to consider as well.
I can only generate so much power on board. And a lot of the stuff on the ground are already
built. The frequencies are already established. So there's just limits to what I can do.
And then of course, there's legal limits. You can't just wake up tomorrow and decide you're
going to start your own radio station, the FCC is going to come shut you down.
And the same goes in space, you can't simply launch a satellite and start broadcasting
willy nilly and whatever frequency you want, you have to get approval to use that. And the
approval comes from through the International Telecommunications Union. And that's fairly
highly regulated, which is a good thing. Otherwise, it'd be chaos up there.
So even though you might want to do certain things, if you don't have the frequency allocation,
you're going to be out of luck in terms of what you can actually do.
So the trade space then here ends up being, what can I do to affect my EV over NO? How can I make
sure that when I talk, people can hear me and understand me? Well, what can I do? Well, I can
talk louder, right? I can get more power out of my spacecraft. But there's going to be a limit,
and there's only so much power I have available from my solar panels. I can get a bigger megaphone,
right? But again, I can only put so big of an antenna on my spacecraft. I can try to get closer,
but hey, if I'm Voyager, I'm leaving the solar system, man. That's not an option. I can try to
get bigger ears on the ground. But most of our ground stations are already fixed. They represent
billions of dollars of investment. I'm probably not going to simply go build new ones necessarily.
I can try to talk slower. That'll make it easier, but then I'm going to take longer to get the same
information to the ground. That means it's going to take more passes to do that. I can try to
reduce the noise in the environment, but there's a limit to what I can do there, especially for
existing systems. And I try to move to higher frequencies, but that means new technologies
often. We're getting a crowding right now because a lot of the frequencies that space has traditionally
used are starting to get more terrestrial applications as well. And when there's a contest
between space application and terrestrial applications, terrestrial tends to win,
which means space is getting crowded out of its traditional S-band, C-band frequencies. In fact,
there's a slew of satellite orders just came in this year because they're trying to provide better
utilization for some of the C-band frequencies that are available, which is good news to people
building satellites. So there's a push to move space to higher frequencies, which is good for
a lot of reasons, but bad because we don't necessarily have all the infrastructure in
place. It's going to represent some big investment to start moving your frequencies around.
So those are issues we have to think about when it comes to these things.
So those are the key issues with communication. So again, I wanted you to understand
fundamentally how communication works. We've got the two cans in the string, we've got our carrier,
and here we have our carrier wave, which is some frequency that's been allocated to us,
and then we're going to modulate our information on top of that. When we talk, we want people to
hear us, which means we need the energy per bit to be greater than the noise. So that means I only
have so many things I can play with there in terms of how loud I talk, how big my antenna is,
distance, frequency, language, speed, environment. And then we have some limitations we have to deal
with, physical, technical, legal, and a number of trade-offs then that impact what we can and can't
do with that. Any questions on RF? So you just got about a semester course on RF communication in
15 minutes or so, but I want to make sure you understand where the... because it's fairly
technical, but it's a technical because it really impacts what you can and can't do. A lot of it's
physics and technology, so we have to be aware of what those limitations are, both from a security
standpoint and a vulnerability standpoint. Any questions on any of that? How's my EB over NO
coming through? So far so good? Nancy, can you hear me? All good?
All good. Loud and clear. All right.
Everything sounds great so far, yeah. Should say 3 dB, that would be good.
So, all right. Well, let's look then at what's happening in the data handling system.
So the data handling system now is really our brains of our spacecraft. So it's doing all the
thinking for us. And so it's got a lot to do, right? If you think of it as a to-do list, it's a
long to-do list. It's got to respond to commands from the ground. It's got to come up with telemetry
from the health and status as well as the payload. It's got to boot up on its own and self-test,
and it has to fix errors if it finds them. And it has to control everything on the satellite. It has
to control the heat. It has to control power. It has to control the pointing. It has to control
rockets. All that stuff has to happen on board that. And it has to be ready to be updated.
So over-the-air updates, kind of like a Tesla, it's got to be ready for over-the-air updates
whenever they're ready. And that could be patches. It could be complete software updates
over the life of the mission. So that's a lot. On top of that, it's got to do it in the space
environment when we just talked about how nasty that place is. So I have to deal with all that
on top of everything else. So it makes this data handling problem pretty difficult.
So that brains of the operation then is tightly coupled to the communication system because
it doesn't do me any good to handle data if I can't communicate it. So sometimes it'll be called
the command and data handling system. Sometimes the communication data handling system. Depends
on who you talk to and which organization they're in. But it's all about moving the data. So I can't
communicate the data if I can't handle it. And just because I handle it, I still need to
communicate it. So all pretty much goes together. So what's in there? So let's look under the hood
here and see what's there. And not too surprisingly, we're basically talking about a
computer, right? So what's in there? Well, we've got some sort of central processing unit, probably
multiple central processing units. We have memory, RAM and ROM, pretty much, you know, solid state
memory these days. Don't fly tape drives anymore. And then input output devices. So space business
tends to lean heavily on standards. So there are a number of data bus standards that are fairly
common. One is called MIL-STD-1553. There's another one called SpaceWire. And they'll, you know, the
1553, I want to say is what about one to three megabits or something like that data rate, which
is fine for most applications on a satellite. And people build equipment to that standard. So it's
easy to get to. And then we have a lot of other components too. So we have transducers that are
measuring stuff all over our spacecraft. So whether it's temperature or pressure or whatever,
we have transducers that act as analog to digital converters to, you know, turn that
analog world into a digital world so that we can do stuff with it. We make a lot of use on
space systems on field programmable gate arrays, FPGAs. There are fairly
versatile processor units that you can program in firmware to do any number of things. We use
them for digital signal processing and other kind of well-defined tasks on board a spacecraft. So
you'll see a lot of FPGAs show up. And then sometimes application-specific integrated circuits
that may be a custom circuit that are done for a specific application. Again,
maybe digital signal processing or maybe some particular payload interaction or something
that we're doing. That's all the hardware. Of course, the hardware is kind of the easy bit.
And then we get to the software. And without software, we got nothing. We just got a box
of silicon. So it's the software that's enabling. So we more and more think of spacecraft as a box
that flies software. We think of software as the complexity sponge for how everything gets done.
And as you go around the spacecraft and look at every single subsystem,
pretty much every subsystem needs some amount of software, some more than others. But it's pretty
hard to do much of anything without software. And software, and that's true across aerospace.
There was a gentleman giving a talk a number of years ago from Lockheed Martin. I think he was
a chief technology officer, chief scientist. And he was talking about that. I think he was talking
about the F-22. And he said that half the cost of the F-22 was in testing, and half of that was
in software. And he made the kind of the joke, and he said he was only half joking, that Lockheed might
be better off giving away airplanes and charging for software. And that's kind of where we're going,
that the price of hardware is asymptoting to zero, and the price of software is asymptoting to
infinity. So most of the cost these days is in software development, testing, maintenance.
We're kind of shifting to a world of DevOps, where we're kind of continuously maintaining
and developing your code. Because that's where the functionality is. And I'm a hardware guy
saying this, and having to admit how important software is. So this is where we're going.
And we're depending on it more and more. So software use has been going up following
Augustine's law, which is 10x every 10 years or so. It's funny, you go back to
1960s, and NASA flew Mariner 6, I think it went to Venus, with 30 lines of code,
three zero lines of code. Now it's probably machine code, and all of you who do software
know that lines of code is a terrible metric. But we use it anyway, because
if you can't measure what's important, measure what you can and argue that it's important.
But we, you know, so now fast forward today, and when they launched the rover on its way to
Mars last week, it probably had something like 2 million lines of code on it. 2 million lines of
code is not impressive when you compare it to a car. So a new car probably has 100 million lines
of code. But space is different, right? So we're, you know, even so space is going up exponentially
in its name, in its use of code. And the way we use code is still different from from a car,
where we have to, we have a lot more demands on space software than we have even on automotive
software. And, and that creates, again, more of a threat space for us to be concerned about.
And when we start depending on code, of course, code can let us down. So this is that famous
example of what happened with the Mars Climate Orbiter. And Mars Climate Orbiter had, was on
its way to Mars, was going to inter-orbit around Mars back in 99. And the way this mission was,
and I'll play the video there, so it was on its way to Mars, it was going to inter-orbit around Mars,
and it was going to fire its rocket to inter-orbit. Remember, it's on that hyperbolic trajectory,
and it was going to just fly by Mars if it didn't slow down. So it gets ready to slow down to
inter-orbit around Mars, but wait for it, they were only off by 169 kilometers,
which means they re-entered, they entered the orbit of atmosphere of Mars and burned up, and
there they went. So all, all, all because of a units problem. This is the infamous units problem
you might have heard about. So what happened here is that there were, the way this mission was
operated, is you had operators in Denver who were keeping track of the, of the bus, basically,
and then you had the mission control, which was at Jet Propulsion Lab out in California,
who was managing the mission. The guys managing the bus out in Denver were keeping track every time
the satellite fired these little rockets, and they'd use these rockets for attitude control,
but they also had slight impact on the, on the trajectory as well. And they were keeping
track of all these rocket firings, and they put it into a file, and then they'd ship it out to JPL,
where they would actually model the trajectory. Well, the guys in Denver were putting it in the
file, modeling it as the thrust being in pounds, pounds force, which is an English unit, and then
they shipped it out to JPL, where they assumed it was in Newtons. Well, what's the difference between
a pound and a Newton? It's a factor of four, and I, the way I tell Americans to remember this is
when they go to McDonald's in Paris, because every American who goes to Paris goes to McDonald's,
that they should order a Newton burger instead of a quarter pounder, because that's how you remember
that. Not a true thing, they don't really sell Newton burgers, but there you go. So they were
off by a factor of four, which, you know, again, very, they weren't firing these rockets very much,
so it was a relatively small correction. And to me, there's an interesting Murphy's Law thing going
on here. You know, you think about it, they could have been off 160 kilometers in the other
direction, right? I mean, left, right, up, down. It just happened to be down. You know, talk about
flipping a coin and having to go the wrong way. It's simply the way it ended up. If they'd ended
up 160 kilometers further away from Mars, they would have still entered orbit, and they would
have said, oh, wow, look, and they would have been fine. But because they flipped the coin the wrong
way, and they ended up closer to Mars, they burned up and all that because of, you know, the way they
managed the software there. So they didn't, the software management development plan wasn't,
was not fully followed. And they hadn't actually, interestingly enough, they never categorized this
as critical software. Pete's asking how much margin of error do they allow for? You'd think
they would allow for more than that 100, you know, you know, they made it, you know, 40 million
kilometers and we're only off by 160. So you'd think they'd have a little bit more margin for
error than that, you know, because, you know, once you're, you know, if you're trying to get into a
400 kilometer orbit around Mars, and you instead entered a 600 kilometer orbit, the cost to change
that is relatively small. So I don't know if they were just trying to, you know, show off and see
how closely they could get, but that did not work out for them. But you're spot on there
on that question. Any questions about this particular debacle?
There's other examples of software getting us in trouble in the space industry.
There's the maiden flight of Ariane 5, where they reused software from Ariane 4, because,
you know, heck, it was just a different rocket, why not? And that reused software caused a trajectory
deviation, which caused the rocket to blow up. So these kind of things can get us in trouble.
Mars Polar Lander, one line, basically one requirement was not allocated to software.
And so you can't really blame software on that one, it was really more of a system engineering
failure. But, you know, these sometimes, you know, seemingly simple things
can cause total disaster on systems like this.
And this is just, this is all us doing it to ourselves, right? You know, let alone some
nefarious actor getting in there and helping us along, you know, so we do enough damage to
ourselves without that. The lander, another lander was a European lander, Skier Pirelli,
which I've never pronounced correctly, but he was the guy that discovered the canals on Mars.
That crashed. Again, that was not, again, probably not a software error, but not completely well
defined software in terms of how it handled the excursions on that inertial measurement unit. So,
you know, there's always, you always kind of point to a root cause problem.
But, you know, again, the space is hard enough without people doing bad things to us.
All right. Any other questions on that? So, key design issues then to think about for
data handling. You need to know what level of autonomy your spacecraft has to deal with,
and the more autonomy, the more complexity. You have to understand all the tasks. What are you
expecting your software to do, and where will it get done? We have some choices. We can do
things on board. We can do them on the ground. We can do it in hardware. We can do it in software.
We can do it in software. We can do it in firmware. You have to understand the environment that
you're going to be dealing with. How bad will that ionizing radiation environment be? NASA
has a mission at Jupiter right now called Juno, and they had to take all the avionics and they
put it inside a titanium vault, and they used the best possible avionics that they could get
and still did all the shielding. And so far, it's been holding up. They thought it would only last
about an Earth year, but I think they're going on, what, three years? I haven't seen much report on
what their single event upset issues are, but they seem to be still doing okay. But Jupiter has an
even worse radiation environment than the Earth because it has a more intense magnetic field.
NASA is talking about landing on one of the moons of Jupiter, Europa,
where they have the ice fields, and under the ice, there's an ocean where the intelligent whales live.
But they think when they land on that surface, on the ice there, they may be only good for a
month or two because of the radiation environment there. So luckily, the intelligent whales are
protected by all the ice, so they're good, but they probably mutate a lot. What was the thing
from mutated sea bass? These are mutated whales. Anyway, so the other thing I need to think about
are developer needs, right? So I've got to develop this code. How are we going to build it? What
language? What development environment? What tools? How am I going to test it? And then we have all
the operational abilities to consider, flexibility, maintainability, and we should also throw
sustainability in there. One of the challenges we face in the space industry especially
is that we use, you know, we tend to use stuff for decades. When the last space shuttle
mission landed, the last HAL programmer lost their job because the shuttle was
programmed using a language called HAL, circa, you know, state-of-the-art 1975, which by, you know,
2005 was no longer a thing. So, you know, when we're trying to maintain software for decades,
that creates huge problems for us and, of course, threat surfaces as well.
So these are the takeaways then for the data handling, understanding what it needs to do,
how it has to correct for errors, the hardware-software interactions that we have to deal
with, and all the software functions that have to be performed both on board and on the ground
for a data handling system. So takeaways from a cyberspace lens here, that first of all,
RF security is a relative small sub-niche of cybersecurity, because we tend to focus,
as you might expect, more on, you know, fiber, because that's what most data is moving around.
But RF is a unique, you know, we are uniquely dependent on RF in the space industry. Now,
and getting access to that equipment is relatively easy, but as we mentioned,
everybody tends to encrypt their stuff, so you have to know their encryption capability.
But there are a lot of hardware-software vendors out there, there are multiple development
environments, there are legacy languages, and all those create additional vulnerabilities.
And then, of course, space relies heavily on software, and the more people get involved there,
the more, you know, both grounded on board, the more additional vulnerabilities we end up making.
Any questions on the vulnerability section, on the RF or data handling?
How are they looking at future AI? Yeah, AI is an interesting discussion. I mean,
space, I'd say, is fairly far behind on that in a lot of ways, because, again,
we tend to be pretty conservative in how we approach that. There, you know, I've seen
discussion of AI more for things like data mining on going through, you know, Kepler's data for
looking for planets, you know, using it, you know, for post-processing, but not so much for, you
know, real-time. I remember even back in the 80s, there was talk about, you know, expert systems
supporting operators, but, you know, it's amazing that even 30 years later, that still has not
really become a thing. So, you know, that's kind of that trade-off between autonomy versus
automation that we get a lot. So I don't see a whole lot of talk, maybe something that maybe
Terry might have a better insight there, but I haven't heard a lot of talk in the space business
about more emphasis on AI for certainly for operations. Decision support, yeah, maybe for
operators, but again, I haven't... I remember that being a quite a bit of talk many years ago,
but I haven't heard much recently about that. Terry, do you have an update on AI applications?
I don't, not in the space arena. I haven't really seen anything there either.
Yeah, it's again, we tend to be pretty slow to the party for new technologies like that.
We're going to find the slides, Meno. They are posted and maybe if Matt's on, he can tell you
where they are in the Discord channel. Are they in the Discord channel, Matt, the slides?
They are in the Discord channel. Yeah, Meno, they're there and if you can't find them,
email me and I can always send them to you. Okay, let's pull up... I'm going to do two things here.
I'm going to give you your cyber challenge. So here's your cyber challenge for the day.
So I'm going to go through the challenge. Then I'm going to post the poll.
Then you can take the poll while you're thinking about the challenge. And then we'll get back
together and talk about it. So here's our scenario, right? So there's a company called
Wiley Imaging and they've been operating a high resolution commercial remote sensing satellite
now for about two years. And the US government is one of their biggest customers. It's in a
sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 710 kilometers. And it has a node crossing of 1030
southbound every morning. When it crosses the equator going south,
the local time is 1030 in the morning. That's what we call it, sun-synchronous. That means
you get shadows. You get mid-morning shadows every time you fly over the equator like that.
Wiley operates their own ground station here in Colorado, but they lease access to two other
ground stations in Norway and Alaska. They're up at the high latitude and this is a sun-synchronous,
which means it's nearly a polar orbit, which means that Norway and Alaska ground stations
can see that satellite nearly every orbit, which is convenient. The satellite was built by Acme
Aerospace in Iowa and there are two other satellites currently in development that plan
to be launched next year. So that's the background. So the issue is, during the last two passes,
we had a Passover in Norway and then we had a Passover in Colorado. The operators noticed bad headers
on about 10 percent of the health and status telemetry data packets. They didn't see any
problem with the payload data packets. And it's actually not unusual that you have
separate downlinks. You have a downlink for health and status and you have a
separate downlink, separate frequency for payload data. So the fact that those are different is not
too amazing. That's actually kind of normal. But they only saw the problem with the
health and status packets and it's on the header on the packets. But this is
about a thousand times worse than they would have expected because we usually plan for like
10 to the minus 5, 10 to the minus 6, let's say one in a million bits to have a problem.
And here you're seeing about a thousand times worse than that or maybe even
worse than a thousand times worse. So it's a lot worse than they would have expected.
So here are your challenge questions. So first of all, how would you determine
if this issue were due to natural or man-made causes? What would your potential reasons be
if it were natural causes? Assuming though that it's malicious cause, what opportunities
would a bad actor have had? Assuming it's malicious cause, what vulnerabilities could
a bad actor have exploited? And then given there are two other satellites in development,
what other design or operational changes could we think about to prevent future issues?
So those are the questions I want you to ponder. While you're pondering that,
I'm going to put up the poll, last poll of the day here.
So you can... I'll let you multitask here. So you can do the poll and then think about the
cyber challenge. You can do the cyber challenge and then come back and think about the poll.
But let's take about 10 minutes to go through that. And I'll give you 10 minutes to take the
poll and think about the challenge. And then we'll get back together and we'll see if some
brave soul online here wants to volunteer their answer to the challenge. So if you have a
multi-deck slide presentation in the next 10 minutes, I'll let you share that with the team.
So let's take about 10 minutes and think about the poll questions and the challenge scenario.
And then we'll bring it back together, review the poll, and then we'll step through the
how to think about this particular challenge problem. And then we'll wrap it up and we'll
be able to call it a day here on time. So go do one or the other or both,
and we'll check back here in about 10 minutes. If anybody has any questions about the challenge,
just let me know and we can try to clarify things for you. We'll be looking for a brave volunteer
who wants to tell us how to solve the challenge here. And I've also posted an end-of-course survey.
We can't use polls for surveys because the data is not persistent in Zoom, so we're using a
separate polling thing. But if you could follow the link to do that poll, we'd appreciate your
feedback. That'd be great to help us figure out how to improve the course for next time.
So I'll give you another five minutes or so to think about the polls, our poll questions here,
and then we'll pull together and talk about the challenge and then wrap it up.
All right, not much attendance on the polls here, but let's go ahead and
close that out and then we'll talk about our challenge.
So, which of the following changes would not increase EV over NO? So data rate. So
making a higher data rate would be the wrong way to go if I'm trying to increase EV over NO.
To jam a satellite, you need to have some noise at the receiver. That would do the trick.
Threat service software has not been static over the years. It's been growing. To spoof a
satellite, you need to know all of the above things, which is a lot of things you have to
be aware of, which means you probably need some sort of way to get into the details of people's
design requirements. And space software is both light and agile. Actually, no, we're kind of
the opposite of light and agile in the space business. All right, well, let's talk about the
challenge. Do I have any brave soul online who wants to tackle the questions? Anybody feel
confident about talking through how you think about these challenge questions? Only one person
at a time. That's the nice thing about virtual presentations, the ability to remain anonymous
is much higher. When you're in a classroom, it's sort of kind of hard to hide. You know, I can
stand, I can hover over you and intimidate you to tackle it. It's less intimidating if we talk
through it together. There we go. Let's do that. So, let's kind of talk through the
background first. So, remember the background information here. So, I just want to highlight
some things that come out of the background, you know, and as we approach these, you know, as you
go forward and start thinking and working in this environment, yeah, we think about, you know, what
kind of information should I be keying in on? So, on the first bullet there, we want to key in on
the fact that the U.S. government is one of their largest customers. So, certainly everybody in the
world is sort of fair game, but the U.S. government is sort of a high profile target. So, if you're
supporting U.S. government, you're kind of putting a target on your back. So, that raises the threat
potential up quite a bit, just the fact that they got, you know, government's one of their big
customers. The next bullet has to do with the orbital mechanics, which we covered here within
the class. So, just the type of orbit I'm in will, in this particular orbit, will limit the number
of times a day that somebody could have access to that satellite from a given site. So, that
really restricts when somebody could have had access to that satellite, you know, line of sight.
So, that is a constraint that kind of narrows the window there in which somebody could have had
access. The other thing to clue in on there is that the Wiley is operating, they're leasing
ground stations from in Norway and Alaska. So, these are lease stations. So, these are companies
that are basically just selling time on their ground site. So, these people, you know, so, you
know, anytime like I'm leasing something, I don't have a lot of control over the software, the
procedures, the personnel. You know, these people are just doing a job passing data from one person
to another. They're going to work, you know, get my data right now, and 10 minutes from now, they'll
get data from somebody else. They don't have any particular loyalties to me, my company, my data,
my program, or anything, right? They're just doing a job. And that means I don't have a lot of insight
too, because I'm basically buying by the minute. I probably can't demand to see all their software,
procedures, or security reviews, or, you know, polygraph interviews with people if they do that.
I don't have any right to ask that stuff, right? I'm just buying by the yard. And then finally,
we got two other satellites in development, which is maybe a good thing. We ought to think about,
okay, well, if there is a hard problem that we've come up with, maybe there's a chance to
resolve that. Pete's saying, can you put that in the contract? You can try. But, you know, if
I'm Universal Space Network, I probably have 100 customers, and I got one small customer coming in
demanding a bunch of stuff for security, I might just tell them to take a hike. Like, sorry,
I don't have the time to give you that, or I'm going to charge you a lot for that. So it just
depends on how big of a lever you have. And if you're one of N customers, you probably don't
have that big of a lever on that. So the other thing then to think about from an issue standpoint,
so as I said, you know, this issue only impacted the health and status, which is not necessarily
unusual. So that should not... it's not overtly suspicious. So that shouldn't necessarily raise
any alarm bells, but it's a useful thing to be aware of. And so it appears the problem is
just in how the protocols are implemented. So this tends to be a software thing where, you know,
you're going to be taking all these ones and zeros and organizing them into packets and adding
headers and footers and things like that. But it appears to be random, but it only appears
to be on the header. So, but again, depending on how that packet protocol works, that is not
necessarily suspicious either. You know, so, but, you know, but these are all things that just file
away in the back of your mind before we tackle the question. So we always want to, you know,
make sure we understand the lay of the land before we dive into the details of the question.
So first question is, well, how do we know that if it's natural or manmade? So I put up here what's
called a fishbone diagram or root cause analysis or Ishikawa diagram. Some of you may have seen
these before, but they're a very useful tool to try to get at root cause. And we do it with
without prejudice. We just, it's a brainstorming tool. And you can think of it as a mind map if
you're used to mind maps. But so we say we kind of list, and you've all seen detective movies,
right, where the detectives have the big board and they have the suspects and they have, you know,
yarn going between everybody in circles and all that. I mean, that's kind of what this is. This
is our suspect board. And so we say, well, who are the usual suspects, right? And equipment,
process, people, materials, environment management, those tend to be the usual suspects.
And we would lay out within those, okay, from an equipment standpoint, what could cause this
problem? What from a process standpoint, what could cause this problem? And we're not trying
to solve the problem. We're trying to say, who are the suspects in this problem? And then we can
start whittling away. Once we've defined the trade space of options, then we can start
whittling away. We can go interview the suspects, see if they have an alibi. If they have an alibi,
then okay, then they're not a suspect anymore. But we'd be thinking about equipment on board.
Okay, well, what about that equipment, hardware, software? Are there any processes? Maybe somebody
on the ground did something wrong in the configuration, and it's being garbled on the
ground. Maybe it's coming, it's fine on the spacecraft, it's getting garbled somewhere on
the ground. Maybe there's people, maybe people that had poor training. Maybe there's people
that are maliciously, you know, scrambling this on their own. I don't know. Environment, of course,
would be the big thing to look at, single event upsets. And what we might do there is call up the
space weather people and find out if there was any sort of large coronal mass ejection
somewhere in that time period. You know, we're trying to correlate, you know, what the time,
because we can sort of narrow down when it happened, because it seemed to be fine one pass,
and then it wasn't fine the next pass. So that narrows down the window there. If there was any
sort of specific thing going on, maybe there was a solar event that could have happened in that
time frame, or maybe it was going through this area of the Van Allen belts, we call the South
Atlantic Anomaly. You know, any of those things could, you know, raise our suspicion level.
You're saying wouldn't that affect everything, not just the heterogeneity? Well, it's random,
right? So all I need is one silver bullet to go into my software, and I don't know what it's
going to do. You know, and if it just happened to affect the one place where that gets encoded
on the headers, then, you know, I can't immediately rule that out. I mean, yeah, it's high, you know,
low probability, but I don't, I wouldn't immediately rule that out, right? So I want to
take a look at it, and I want to do this systematically. What we're trying to do is
have an, you know, an unbiased, you know, let's not jump to conclusion and, you know, start launching
nuclear weapons at bad guys because they attacked our satellite. We want to, you know, let's find
a smoking gun, but let's do it methodically. So this is how I would go about trying to,
to come to that root cause. And we may decide, no, there, you know, there's the probability of
this being natural is just too low. It has to, and, you know, the, the impact is too,
too systematic. It's not random enough. And therefore we might, you know, start to suspect,
you know, people, which is, you know, malicious actors in that case.
If it were environment, which is question two, again, we've been, as we've been talking, it's
most likely a single event upset that could cause that, but, but not necessarily. It could be a,
maybe thermal stress led to a problem with a processor or something like that. So, you know,
there are other potential environmental causes as well, but single event upsets tends to be
one that causes these sort of random events. But assuming it is malicious going to question three,
where are the opportunities? Well, I mean, if it happened between passes,
that's a pretty narrow opportunity. I say, I mean, maybe an hour, they could have had opportunity to
do some sense, something directly in there. And again, that's not out of the question,
but that would mean they would have had to actually command our satellite directly,
which means they would have had to know all those things we talked about. They'd have to
have the frequency, they'd have to have the encryption, they'd have to have the command codes.
They'd really have to know our system very well. Not out of the question, but again,
fairly low likelihood. So it would seem it's probably more likely that that
came in somewhere sooner. And maybe it came in as a Trojan horse to be, you know, with a,
with a time tag that says after, you know, you know, 30 hours from now or 30 weeks from now,
implement this. And so, and so who knows when it was injected? It could have been
all the way back to the factory, right? So we don't know at this point. But those are,
so that's, that's the malicious thing. That's the scary thing about code is that, you know,
you can put code in that can be sitting there, you know, kind of a sleeper agent
to get, get activated who knows when. So what are the vulnerabilities then? Just,
you know, again, if I'm talking about hundreds, you know, a satellite like this probably has
hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Yeah, you could be hiding in there somewhere
and maybe get overlooked. You can get overlooked during testing. In the fact that we've got these,
we're using the ground stations that to me, that's a, that's a red flag. And it's just,
you've got things outside your span of control, direct span of control that can be
entry points for bad actors there. And then finally, we, because we have these guys still
in the barn being, being developed. If it turns out the problem is a natural environment problem
that our, our hardware maybe is not robust enough against single event upsets. I mean,
we could consider swapping out processors. I mean, that's a pretty major design change,
especially fairly late in the game. But if it turns out we're particularly vulnerable,
or maybe there's some thermal issue that caused it. We may have to take a serious look at our
design to see if we can mitigate that in, but through a design change. If it's code,
we may have to do a full scrub. We may have to go back through and look at all the software
grounded on board to see if there's anything hiding in there. And maybe we need to go take
a look at our personnel. Maybe go to do a, you know, security check on our people and see if
there's any, anything suspicious going on there. And somebody, you know, driving to work in a
Ferrari and last week they had a, you know, junker car. And you know, where'd they get all the money
all of a sudden kind of thing. You know, that might look suspicious. So, so those are things
we could look at. Pete's asking if it was a code update, how would they consider do that for ones
on orbit? Well, we can, we actually can change code on orbit pretty well. I mean, again, depending
on the extent, you probably, you couldn't change your entire architecture maybe so much, but,
but if it turns out that was, you know, this was lurking in one unit or module of code,
we could, that would be a, you know, not, I would say easy thing to do, but it's a doable thing
to re overwrite that code or patch around it or something like that. Yeah. We, we make code
changes fairly often. I mean, you know, almost, you know, I would say routinely are making code
changes on spacecraft. So that, that would not be a difficult thing to do depending on the extent.
Now, again, if it's, you know, if it's corrupted badly, that might take a lot of surgery to fix,
but, and we may not have a choice there if this is a problem. Anybody see, did I miss anything
there? Any, any other issues or ideas that maybe we might want to think about as we tackle this,
this challenge? All right. Well, we did pretty well then today. So let's recap what we did today.
So we, we went through, we started with context. So we looked at that mission architecture
and the reasons we went to space. We talked about opportunities. So we looked at orbits
and operations, got you all up to speed on how to do a, you know, to become orbital mechanics.
So you're getting ready to get out your wrench and fix an orbit next time. We looked at threats,
natural and human threats, especially those natural threats and how insidious they can be.
And, you know, just the, the denials of service we get on a day-to-day basis, just because
space is a hard place to be. And then we finished up looking at those vulnerabilities. So the RF,
RF links, spent some time looking at how we make sure that we get viable connections through the
RF links. And then talked about the data architecture and overall data systems
ground and on board that also become potential threat surfaces for us. So that was what we tried
to cover. These were our objectives. So again, we're trying to climb that learning trajectory
there from, from the pad all the way into orbit. Wanted you to have some core space knowledge.
So you feel a little more confident talking to people about space issues and some of the
limitations and capabilities and threats and vulnerabilities that are out there. Wanted you
understand some of the trade-offs, especially as they apply to cybersecurity domain. Things like
the access that you get from orbital mechanics and the, all the different things that happen
in operations. There's nine different things that we laid out of, of activities and operations and,
and any one of those can be a potential entree for a threat. The natural environment, I hope you had
a, an appreciation for how hard that environment is just, you know, on a good day. And now when
we throw bad actors in there, what, what, you know, relatively small changes can have big impact
on overall mission operations. And then finally wanted you to be able to step back from some real
world scenarios and apply the knowledge that we gained here in the class and be able to look at
those critically to understand what kind of issues might come up and how would we think through these
issues? And we're going to see these issues, I think, come up more and more over time. And we
have to be able to, you know, differentiate the natural, naturally occurring problems from the
unnaturally occurring ones, and then figure out what to do about it. I mean, we've got a,
there's a lot of potential holes to plug here in terms of vulnerabilities. And we may be,
you know, running around playing holes or all our life, but we have to be able to ready to
identify those holes and think about what kinds of things we can do to address them going forward.
So we thank you for your time and attention. Thanks, Terry. Thanks, Jason,
for this. And we'll, I'll probably stop recording at this point. And I'll just kind of throw it
open to any other questions. I'll hang around as long as anybody needs if they have questions,
and we will go.