Space-based satellite equipment is critically important for daily life on Earth. It enables real-time communications; timing for banking and stock market transactions; navigation and positioning; and surface monitoring for weather predictions, including climate change impacts such as rising ocean temperatures or flooding, and imagery. The private sector uses space systems for commercial activities, data transfers, and providing services to customers such as satellite TV and internet access. Nations use space systems for national security, and militaries use space systems for secure communications and satellite imagery for reconnaissance and strategic planning.

Increasingly, satellite systems are connected to the internet for both satellite command and control and to receive and relay data across space networks. Cyberspace relies on space equipment just as it does on Earth-based hardware. During the Cold War, the major powers tested anti-satellite weapons that involved physically attacking and destroying an enemy’s satellite. These types of attacks create space debris, threatening other objects in space, and are direct forms of aggression between states. The cyber element of space-based systems opens new avenues for potential attacks on space equipment that do not create physical hazards in space, and because of the online nature of these threats, they are difficult to detect and determine their origin. Cyberwarfare often falls below the threshold of full-scale war and enables many actors to participate, including non-state actors, hacktivists and terrorists, all of which increases distrust among nations and heightens geopolitical tensions.

In this video, the editors of the CIGI essay series Cybersecurity and Outer Space explain the importance of space systems for civilian and military activities, the changing landscape marked by the increase in private sector space activity and the complexity of updating space governance to reflect this changed landscape. The editors are Jessica West, CIGI senior fellow and senior researcher at Project Ploughshares; Wesley Wark, CIGI fellow and former member of the prime minister of Canada’s Advisory Council on National Security; and Aaron Shull, CIGI managing director and general counsel.

The essay series explores three themes: space security and risk, international governance challenges, and global perspectives and inclusivity, with the view that international space law, norms and rules need to be strengthened and further defined to address the changing space environment, which includes the private sector and cyber-related activities in space. Without addressing these important governance issues, we risk warfare spilling into space and making the space systems that all of humanity relies on unusable for future generations.

Read the essay series introduction here: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/s...

Cybersecurity and Outer Space
A CIGI Essay Series
is available here: https://www.cigionline.org/space-gov