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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password with Peter Warren, unlocking the secrets of technology. Now, only a mile from the Resonance FM studio at London’s Riverbank Plaza Hotel, some of the world’s top experts in off-planet warfare are meeting right now. To draw up their battle lines. They’ve heard a stirring address from the UK’s Vice Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Gordon Messenger. Speakers from the US, Brazil, Australia, and all the world’s leading weapons manufacturers are talking about technologies to help control what they call warfighters from space. And while it does not appear on the agenda, one of the topics that’s certain to be discussed in the conference’s corridors is a new and worrying development element, the war that is beginning in space as satellites begin to attack each other and hackers try to take over networks. Still in its infancy, this literal Star Wars is described in euphemisms such as snuggling or grilling, but the results of it could be deadly. For Dr. Patricia Lewis, the director of security at the renowned Royal Institution of International Affairs, Chatham House, the potential fallout from the conflict is so worrying that she is calling for all future satellites to be equipped with cybersecurity to prevent them from being taken over. Though, as she points out, a lot of the satellites that are already in space have no security at all.
Speaker C: From now on, cybersecurity needs to be included in satellite launches from now on, and just getting that will help. But all that stuff that’s still up there is a problem. So there’s stuff that’s up there that’s obviously linked in, in terms of uploads and downloads. So you can do patches, you can increase the security that way. And then there’s stuff up there, I would say, that’s so old and ancient that it’s pretty hard to do that.
Speaker A: Now, that’s a big problem, isn’t it? Because there’s this installed base nobody ever thought that you would be able to get in contact with it from down here. So it didn’t actually have any security on it at all.
Speaker C: That’s right. So, you know, I think that there’s real legacy issues and we, we’re just going to have to weather those. We’re just going to have to deal with those. So if we look at, for example, some attacks that we’ve known about on weather, US weather satellites. Now you might say, well, what does it matter terribly attacking a US weather satellite? US weather satellite system is part and parcel of the strategic system. Missile launches, aircraft, all require those satellites to be functioning as best they can. And if they’re not functioning, for us to know they’re not functioning. So one of the things we’ve identified is one of the greatest weaknesses is what we would call spoofing of data. So this is where you use a cyber hack to slightly offset the data so that your information is not quite what you think it is and you can’t rely on it.
Speaker A: Which is a tremendous issue, isn’t it? Kinetic have been doing some work in this, but not just that. If the nuclear weapons systems, for example, if Polaris had differing information, or say somebody had suddenly told it from one of these satellites sea level was different then it’s going to be a pretty ineffective system.
Speaker C: Totally. So, and then this, what that does is it undermines your own confidence in your own missile systems. Now, the aircraft industry, and particularly in the United States, the Federal Aviation Authority, has been on top of this for a bit longer. So, you know, they’ve been looking at building in cybersecurity very early on, isolating systems as best they can but not relying on it, and also using authentication signals so that you increase your certainty that it’s an authentic signal as opposed to a a spoofed signal. Jamming signals is another problem, and you know, we all know about jamming using electronics, but using cyber techniques you can also jam. The thing about jamming is it’s dangerous, but at least you know you’ve lost the signal, at least you know it’s not there. Spoofing, it seems to us, is much more insidious a threat and has scope for so much mischief. So one of the things we’re proposing is that there be a community of the willing, people who really want to get to grips with this. We’ve seen a group of governmental experts in the UN, we’ve seen two of them, one on space, one on cyber, start to come together to talk about, you know, what they can do collaboratively, what applies in cyberspace. Does international law apply? Yes, is the answer. They have agreed that. And, you know, we need to be thinking about the international critical infrastructure on which we all depend and building in as much cybersecurity as we can internationally, as well as thinking about it nationally and regionally and in our collaborations. Because the thing about space, we can’t afford not to be international. It is an international domain and it’s so connected in across the world, and in fact we use it to connect across the world, that we can’t afford to be too insular about our approaches. One of the things that people forget about is the timing data. I think we, you know, we’ve all got in our minds about the positional navigational data, but the timing data that that provides is fundamental to the financial sector. All of the timing of financial transactions are done through that. And in addition, we have the timing data for obviously other logistics such as aviation, maritime, all of our sort of logistics with our train systems and right down to many of our traffic networks and so on. So if you mess around with the timing data, you could create havoc. So at the moment—
Speaker A: Not just create havoc, but you could create an incredible crime. You could create a financial crisis.
Speaker C: Yeah, you could steal lots of money.
Speaker A: A crime on the stock exchange, and it would allow you to mess around with the latency.
Speaker C: And who’s to say that hasn’t happened already?
Speaker A: Presumably this means that nation states have been pretty aware of this, that they have programs to, I suppose, a fallback position of attacking satellites.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker C: So I mean, what we can assume, I think, is that those who have skin in the game have been at least carrying out red team, blue team type exercises, if not, you know, having playing a bit of mischief around themselves. So one of the things that, you know, in our research we came across was clearly that there have been tests done on their own satellites. So say a government owns a fleet of, you know, weather satellites or global positioning satellites or whatever, they can test out their satellites themselves. So some of the attacks that might have been witnessed or reported on could be own goals, as it were. But it’s clear to us that there have been so many reports of satellite hacks that it would be really unusual if there wasn’t some blowback from those who’ve been hacked, who haven’t been trying to do it back to the countries they think have been trying to do it to them. And then the other question we have is, you know, what about the commercial companies? What sort of hacking have they been witnessing or not? Are they where they should be? Are they— have they been hacked and keeping it quiet? You know, all of those things that we saw in the banking sector earlier on, been going on in the space sector as well. And we don’t know the answers to all of those questions, but if we think about what we’ve learned from the financial sector, if we think about what we’ve learned from the logistics sector, then I think we can assume that there’s more to it than we know.
Speaker A: So those factors can actually be eliminated from any inquiries?
Speaker C: Yes, I think so, or at least we need to think about that, we need to think about it in advance so that we prevent it. We are so dependent on space. People aren’t talking about it enough, It’s not science fiction. This is real life now.
Speaker B: Patricia Lewis, the director of security at Chatham House, warning about the conflict that is going on in the heavens. And she’s not alone, expert voice. Two months ago, the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank for the armed forces, held a tight-lipped debate on the issue. In a press release on the event, it spoke of the potential for physical attacks on satellites from missiles, satellites with grappling arms, and of cyberattack. It was a theme that QinetiQ, the former UK defence research agency privatised by Tony Blair, expanded on. Satellites, it said in an essay offered up to internet editors by Nigel Davies, head of secured navigation for the weapons development company, were being spoofed, having their information lines taken over. And they were being jammed. Both areas of concern for Dr. Lewis, though for Kinetic the issue was that cybercriminals could easily take advantage of weak and unprotected satellites. Kinetic’s Davies was not available, so we spoke to Professor Neil Barrett, a former academic at the Royal Military College at Shrivenham, who was shocked by the potential of a weakness that could make a cybercriminal very rich. According to Professor Barrett, Kinetic were warning that you could jam a satellite and cause a crash in the financial markets because the stock markets and high-value transactions— According to Professor Barrett, Kinetic were warning that you could jam a satellite and cause a crash in the financial markets because The stock markets and high-value transactions are dependent on timestamps from satellites.
Speaker A: If you’re sitting there ready for, uh, it’s called a flash crash. If you’re sitting there ready for some abrupt fluctuation in the price of something, which is what you would get if you just blocked off the signal for a short period of time, you know, that crucial time of day. If you’re the one sitting there ready for that particular value to trip over, then you can trade quite quickly on that, especially because it would be automatic trailing. Trading. It will be algorithmic, so the reaction times on it would be up there with those microsecond values that you were talking about.
Speaker B: So does that mean that you could then make a—
Speaker A: I mean, if you’re sitting there ready for it, or you could probably make a fortune accidentally out of it as well. But if you’re the one sitting there knowing exactly when it’s going to happen and what it is that’s going to be— going to be affected by it, yes, you could. And that’s without—
Speaker B: practically, you could hedge that position too.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: Because you could put in place an algorithm that would work either way.
Speaker A: That’s right, yes. Yeah, all you need is for it to just jump upwards or downwards, and, and you’ve got your, um, you’ve got your effect. When you saw that just, um, it was a couple of days ago, wasn’t it? There was a flash crash.
Speaker B: It resulted in the catastrophic fall in the pound, and it was, uh, compensated for virtually immediately.
Speaker A: Yeah, but the point is that these— is that virtually immediately, if you’re trading in those microsecond time units, which is what you just said, virtually immediately is A hell of a long time.
Speaker B: Um, Kinetic has a long association with the government. In fact, it used to be the Defense Evaluation Research Agency. The fact that they’re warning about this could be indicative that they may have some knowledge that something has actually been occurring.
Speaker A: I, you know, to be honest, I really wouldn’t want to try and guess that. It would be astonishing if it wasn’t, because the cool thing with this is you’re talking about having an effect just from a denial of service attack, which is just ridiculously easy to affect. So the actual entry barrier for the expertise on affecting those timing signals isn’t great. It’s just where is the satellite at any point in time, where am I flashing my laser at, or whatever your blasting tool is of choice. Then if you’re looking at spoofing on top of that, if you factor in an extra level of technology so that you do— do you remember that book from ages and ages ago about a, um, a hacker being pursued by somebody called Takenawaga or Takengawa, some such name. I can’t remember exactly where it was, but a Japanese name of a computer security guy in America.
Speaker B: Kevin Mitnick.
Speaker A: Yes, after Mitnick. Mitnick’s hack that that’s all about is, first of all, you do denial of service attack and Well, that’s your fingers turning now. After the denial of service attack, you then pretend to be the system that you have knocked off the net, and then you’re trusted because of the way the network was set up. You are trusted, so off you go and you’ve got access to it. Well, you do exactly the same thing here with the satellite. You slowly increase the amount of interference that is coming onto the satellite. So that the systems on the ground relying on it up their level of sensitivity to the signal, so that they’re wanting more and more and more of this very poor quality signal. Then you knock it out and you pretend to be it from somewhere else on the ground, say, with only a very faint signal, but just stronger than the barrier, than the boundary that you’ve just set in place. You see what I’m saying? That you can pretend to be then the system up in the sky, and well, bad things happen. I wouldn’t like to guess on exactly what you can do from that because it would be a bit silly of me to try.
Speaker B: But then that means that you would be able to do something very, very similar to what was seen in the Ocean’s Eleven film, for example, where you could actually show a picture of an event happening as normal where it’s not appearing as normal.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: And that event could be either a data stream, it could be a picture from the Earth, it could be anything that you wanted it to be.
Speaker A: Well, but if it’s a timing signal, it can be a timing signal that slowly goes out of sync. Given that it is essentially a denial of service attack at the beginning, it’s a jamming denial of service attack, you know, you know that there’s not a huge barrier to entry to be able to do that. So yeah, you’d have to say if it’s not here now, then somebody’s missing a trick. If you can start affecting what the satellite does. And the thing with the satellite is for ages and ages, there wasn’t really the thought of securing the satellite at the satellite’s end because, well, you want to put up the smallest amount of stuff. You put up quite old software because it’s old and reliable and been tested and you know that it’s going to keep working. And you don’t put a great deal of power up into the satellite. They need to be small and light and simple and reliable and safe. But it’s not until quite recently that they also have to be secure.
Speaker B: Professor Neil Barrett, who like Chatham House’s Dr. Lewis, is concerned about the lack of protection on legacy systems in space. Though perhaps they should not be so worried because, as Alice Bunne, the Director of Policy at the UK Space Agency, points out, satellites with grappling arms have been developed that can forcibly retire an aging satellite and could just as easily propel a perfectly healthy one into a graveyard orbit. Accidentally, of course. Here’s Alice Bunne to tell us in more detail about the dirty tricks that are going on hundreds of miles above our heads. And, as we know, in space, no one can hear you scream.
Speaker A: So there are deliberate attacks on satellites, and there are also increasingly a risk of an increasing number of collisions as well, which may not be deliberate but are equally catastrophic.
Speaker B: Okay, because people are talking about what almost sounds like a sci-fi world where there are satellites with lasers that are going and disrupting other satellites. And obviously people are saying these aren’t offensive lasers, but I presume that if you have a laser which is a telecommunications laser, which if you point at a certain position on a satellite, you can probably cause that satellite, if it’s using a laser, to be disrupted in some way. There seems to be a general policy of disruption that’s going on.
Speaker A: And therein lies the problem, because actually there is an enormous amount of innovation. There’s an incredible amount of, as I say, you know, services that can be enabled from space. And we see all these very exciting programs, but often one program which can be very nobly designed to enable something very good can also have negative consequences. So at the moment, one of the exciting developments is the idea that you could have a spacecraft approaching another satellite, um, be it for instance a geostationary telecommunications satellite that’s running out of fuel. You could refuel that and extend that mission lifetime by many, many years. Clearly, if you have the capability to interact with a fully functioning, healthy satellite, you also have the capability to interact with that satellite and either extend its life or indeed end its mission rather quickly. And that’s often where establishing the norms of behavior and getting international consensus becomes very, very difficult.
Speaker B: Do you think that there is a need for some of these satellites to be— or for some to be stated as sacrosanct, that people should say, no, you— there are some satellites that we are so dependent on that if anybody interferes with them that should be seen as a war crime?
Speaker A: Well, indeed. I mean, the space sector was recently designated as part of critical national infrastructure in the UK. And I think this is, this is often the issue with space, is that people don’t realize exactly how dependent we are on spacecraft. I mean, people take it for granted that you get an accurate weather forecast or secure communications or secure navigation. Actually, you take those services away, and we are really rather crippled down on Earth. So it’s absolutely essential, I would say, not necessarily that satellite— individual satellites are deemed sacrosanct, but that we do crack this problem of establishing norms of behavior in space and making sure that we can keep the space environment as a safe operating area.
Speaker B: But interestingly, Kinetic warned within the past 2 months again that spoofing and jamming going on, and the spoofing in particular actually introducing erroneous information into satellites. I mean, that is a worry, not just in the financial sector, but again, if it were done in a weapons system, for example.
Speaker C: That’s exactly right.
Speaker A: And that’s why very often, you know, satellite and space systems are really driving some of the highest security protocols. There’s an irony here that on the one hand, satellite systems are some of the most secure systems that you could imagine because to physically interfere with the a satellite is very, very difficult. However, the nature of them means that they are utterly, utterly dependent on very, very resilient cyber security controls. So on the one hand, they’re very, very safe.
Speaker B: On the other hand, they’re very vulnerable, as was pointed out by some hackers around the turn of the century who claimed that they’d moved one of the satellites via the Oakleaf ground station, a satellite that was used by the Ministry of Defence and by a communications company?
Speaker A: It’s exactly these kind of vulnerabilities where they exist that we seek to address, particularly on those programs that have a strategic defense interest.
Speaker B: Because cybersecurity is a big issue, isn’t it? It’s noticeable now that many satellite companies are stressing that they have very, very good cybersecurity.
Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s true more widely in the UK in general. You know, our cybersecurity credentials as an industrial sector are very, very high.
Speaker B: But one of the points that is being made too is that, okay, this is only on the more modern satellites, that there are a lot of satellites up there, legacy systems, that actually have no cybersecurity on them at all.
Speaker A: Yeah, particularly when you’re looking at some of those systems which many years ago, I don’t think people foresaw just quite how much the space environment would be used. And what that meant was that when they were launching things into into space, they may not necessarily have taken account of cybersecurity controls, neither may they always have taken account of the need to safely de-orbit, to either go out into what’s known as the graveyard orbit, or to burn up on reentry. So it’s not only a cybersecurity issue, it’s a physical security issue as we get to a point where we’re increasingly using space and those orbits are becoming increasingly congested.
Speaker B: There are some wonderful terms that are coming out of this. Well, I suppose a diplomat would call it aggressive posturing in space. Snuggling—
Speaker C: what’s snuggling?
Speaker A: Um, snuggling refers to the practice of a satellite closely following another. Unlike in other domains like air, land, or sea, there isn’t any established protocols around what is an acceptable distance, what is viewed as an unacceptable or even aggressive span in terms of the distance between craft. So that’s an area that people have particularly identified in recent years as an area where we do need to identify some kind of international norm.
Speaker B: There are some satellites now that have got grappling arms on them, and you’re saying that people are going to have to use those grappling arms responsibly.
Speaker A: There’s a number of different ways of getting rid of space debris. We know people are looking at systems with nets, systems with harpoons, systems with, you know, grappling arms. But of course, you know, the same principle applies to all of them.
Speaker C: If you can take out something that’s—
Speaker A: if you can get something that’s broken out of the way, equally you can get something that’s fully functioning out.
Speaker B: So is the issue there that you’re talking about is that a grappling arm is okay, it’s dual use?
Speaker A: The—
Speaker B: what you’re saying is space is meant to be a non-military environment. However, if If you have a grappling arm, that could be a weapon.
Speaker A: Exactly so.
Speaker B: The UK Space Agency’s Alice Bunne, and she was not alone in her views on the celestial conflict. Philip Harlow, president of ExStar, a commercial satellite company which provides services to military and governments around the world, confirmed the ongoing attacks on systems, and from his position on the communications coalface, provided graphic details of the tactics used by space powers. As Harlow points out, being on the receiving end of a snuggling satellite is definitely unwanted attention.
Speaker A: Yes, so, um, we call those snuggler satellites, so that snuggle up next to a commercial or a military satellite and have a good poke around. Yes, that is extremely worrying. And, you know, I think that as governments look at what capabilities Satellites need to be on orbit to either prevent or protect. That is one of the biggest threats because once you have a sort of snuggler satellite that can creep around without really being spotted, you now have the ability to introduce a whole lot of different threats to the space domain.
Speaker B: So these snugglers, what do they do? Do they sort of crawl all over you like some sort of unwanted suitor and examine your technology?, or do they try to interfere with your signals?
Speaker A: So let’s talk about two different things. One is what they have done to date, and the other one is what they could do. Right now it’s partly a technology demonstration. Can we get an object on orbit that can really get close to some of these very, very important satellites that are up there in space? So that’s the technology. And I would think that at this point they have been— they’ve got cameras on board and they’re probably having a very good look at They may have other technologies on there which could provide future capability, or they may be building new satellites, new smuggler satellites that can get up there and do different things. They could do RF interference from very close by. They could do kinetic damage from very close by. Now you don’t need a rocket to launch something from the ground. You can launch, you know, the equivalent of a Gatling gun from 20 yards away and destroy the satellite. The most effective way is to disable a satellite without creating creating debris is to simply grapple the satellite and tow it away from Earth and fling it out into space. So that is a way of disabling your opponent’s capability without damaging the orbital arc to the extent that it’s no longer usable by either yourself or anybody else. That is a big concern for sure. But as you say, there are other things that can be done. You can specifically damage parts of a satellite from very close by without creating debris or without creating much debris. Debris. So you can damage the batteries, for example, or the antennas or the solar panels. So there are a lot of things that could be done by these type of satellites. And that’s got a lot of people very—
Speaker B: No, absolutely, because there’s also these other threats, aren’t there? I mean, you mentioned people potentially putting Gatling guns on satellites. Some people are talking about putting lasers on satellites, which obviously can directly interfere with many of the signaling systems that you’re using, can’t they?
Speaker A: Laser technology has come a long way. I don’t think we are quite at the point of the James Bond cutting through the middle of satellites, but we’re certainly headed in that direction. So lasers are also an interesting weapon if you can get it to the right point to burn out components within a satellite without destroying the bus itself.
Speaker B: Yeah, and doing those sorts of things, people have even talked about grilling, haven’t they? They’ve talked about reprogramming a satellite so that the solar arrays actually overheat and start to fry the satellite.
Speaker A: Yeah, I think there are a lot of, a lot of individual pieces that can be attacked, and hence all of the satellite operators are working very hard on their cyber posture to see how they can prevent anybody else from getting inside. So it’s a very dangerous time for all of us if we don’t get ahead of this.
Speaker B: And that when you talk about their cyber posture, these snuggling satellites coming up close to them, they’re not the ones that they’re not the ones trying to do the cyber attack. The cyber attack is being done via hackers through ground stations and then up to the satellite. Is that the only way that you can get onto a satellite via a cyber attack?
Speaker A: I think that’s the conventional thinking. I would postulate that if I was putting a satellite up into to space that I would be trying to find some way to do local access through the RF systems over a distance of meters rather than thousands of kilometers. So I think that today the efforts to interfere with satellites through cyber are almost 100% through the ground, but I do think that there’s going to be efforts in the near future to do it from satellites or something similar to that. Interruption of the flow of data I think is one aspect that I think that’s fairly simple to achieve. The probably more devastating aspect would be to insert false data into the data stream if you are able to get into that. And I think that we’re very close to that being readily possible, readily doable. And so that’s in my mind much more dangerous, much more devastating by putting in false data.
Speaker B: —which is a practice known as spoofing.
Speaker A: Yes, so yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do.
Speaker B: Philip Harlow of Extar, who like Professor Barrett, Kinetic, and Dr. Lewis can see significant dangers in the practice of inserting false data into the data stream. So, bar the fact that our satellites are so wedded into our critical infrastructure that they could cause a disastrous failure, why should we worry? Well, one good reason is that soon there will be a lot more satellites up in space, and if they don’t have any cybersecurity on them, they could be easily turned into rogue satellites and become lethal weapons. Here’s Andrew Rogoyski, a former UK government advisor and now the head of security at the Canadian satellite multinational CGI, on the new space race.
Speaker A: I think there’s a lot of interest in space. I think we’re reaching a tipping point where the technology is starting to catch up with aspiration and where there are private sector organizations providing some of the capabilities that have previously only been provided by government organizations. So Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and other entrepreneurs who are seeing space as the new frontier and can see it affordably making good business sense. So what are the business propositions and what is the business sense that organizations can see in space? One of the most important business propositions for space is communications, and this is illustrated by the growing interest in providing internet services through satellite constellations. And this, this for the first time is getting to the level which is affordable and tractable as a business case, that we can actually reach the last few percent of people who are currently unable to access internet services, not only within developed countries but around around the world. And for the first time, these constellations start to make sense. They start to be affordable. Previously, they’ve just been too expensive. And we’ve just found that those people living in remote regions will just never have access to the power and the knowledge that’s embodied in the internet. Well, that’s the interesting point, isn’t it? Because even though people spoke about mobile phones initially and they called them satellite phones— in fact, in some places they still are called sat phones One of the things that happened very quickly to any signal from a mobile phone was that it got channeled in via a base station into the existing telecommunications infrastructure which is in the ground. It wasn’t actually going up into space at all. And this notion of the cloud, it’s not in the cloud. It’s probably in your basement in a server room somewhere. I think that remains where the bulk of communications traffic will come from. Will go, will remain. It’s still cheaper to lay glass fiber over parts of the world and provide very high bandwidth communications. But there are still areas of the world where people live, where people need access to services, where it’s just too expensive to consider those landlines, those fiber links. And nobody wants to invest in creating high bandwidth communications capability in those parts of the world. Satellites have been seen as a potential answer for that, but they’ve been too expensive to really provide that solution. But so what you’re saying though is that those remote places are now making all of this viable. But surely there’s not that many remote places. In the government’s broadband strategy, it was only saying that I think there was only about between 10 or 6% of the country that wasn’t reachable by the conventional networks? There may only be a few percent of people who are unreachable by conventional networks, and that’s in a country like the UK where it remains largely uneconomic to provide services, conventional services to those parts of the population. And increasingly those people need services as government services go online, as our commercial services, banking, education, health services all depend on online services. Really need to provide digital services to the entire population. So it may only be 4 or 5% of the population, but that becomes a very important part of the populace that’s missing these services. I mean, there’s no other way to provide it. That’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because in places like Africa, for example, or other developing areas of the world, to actually put infrastructure in would be a huge cost, and satellites can be a very very simple and easy way to do that, can’t they? Putting up a satellite constellation which can cover as much of the Earth as possible is enormously attractive as a potential way of solving some communications problems. But historically it’s been a problem of cost as it’s not just about the spacecraft, it’s about getting the spacecraft there, so it’s about the launch capability. It’s about the ground stations that serve that. It’s about the business infrastructure that supports that. Makes the whole thing very expensive. Now some of those costs are starting to come down. New launch capabilities are coming online. And the satellite technologies themselves are getting at lower cost, smaller, cheaper to produce, and above all, much more high capability. So the actual bandwidth you can put through a satellite is increasing. And finally, the time which it takes you to put a constellation of satellites then is reduced. One of the challenges that has existed historically is if you’re talking about an investment program which won’t result in a constellation being available, whether it’s for satellite communications, whether it’s for Earth observation, whether it’s for navigation, if it takes you 10 years to put that constellation up,— it doesn’t make it a viable proposition in most terms because the pace of communications technology is such that the terrestrial solutions will vastly outstrip the capabilities of anything that you can plan to put in space.
Speaker B: Andrew Rogozki on why we are about to fill space with satellites that will mean that you will be able to get onto the internet even at the ends of the Earth. You will never be alone again unless Unless someone takes over your satellite. It’s a prospect that John Serafini, vice president of Allied Mines, a company that specializes in taking technology from the military and commercializing it, doesn’t quite think will happen. He doesn’t also think that the threat is that great. But 3 years from now, perhaps. Though one of the technologies that Serafini is aiming to exploit is known as Hawkeye 360. A satellite system that can track shipping to make sure it’s doing what it should be. But he’s not going to be investing in space cybersecurity just yet. But he is putting his money into space because, like Rogoyski, he thinks that some parts of space are now within reach of many of us because of miniaturization.
Speaker A: I, I, I, well, I think that the, you know, the protection of our space-based assets will be increasingly important for data preservation integrity in the future. It’s not where my investor dollars would be. Let me finish that thought though. If you go and you look at the ecosystem of, say, Silicon Valley and you see— look for how many startup companies are focused on space-based communication security. I would tell you I think it’s a very, very small number and they tend to be a pretty good harbinger of where threats come in the future. So my guess would be we could see see in the next 2 to 3 to 4 years a new crop of cybersecurity startup companies that are focused on space-based communications, just like 3 years ago there really didn’t exist cybersecurity companies focused on interconnected vehicles, right, or aircraft. But today, there’s the beginnings of that ecosystem of young companies propping up to defend against that attack and that new threat surface, and I think you’ll see it similarly in the next 3 years for space. Why this new interest in satellites and space? What is actually driving this interest? I’m more focused on business plans and applications that are now more relevant because of the cost efficiencies that we’ve seen in the past 5 to 7 years of satellite componentry and the cost of launch decreasing significantly that make it easier to put to put small satellites, something smaller than 100 kilograms, into orbit, be it low Earth orbit. And that didn’t exist 5 to 7 years ago to the extent it is today. And that’s part of the democratization of space. Some of the other applications, going to Mars, going to the moon, mining asteroids, et cetera, while they’re cheaper today than they would have been 5 to 7 years ago, they still require leap-ahead advancements in technology, I believe, before they’re fully viable. Whereas some of the technology and the business cases that you see today with Earth observation capabilities and synthetic aperture radar and RF monitoring capabilities like Hawkeye 360, those are business plans that can close today and can be generating revenue upon launch into orbit. So I think that they’re closer in. So that’s a really fascinating point, isn’t it? Because what you’ve said makes absolute sense. It’s the microcircuitry. It’s the fact that you can make things smaller now. That is making space more attractive because that will cost less to send up into space because obviously the cost is the launch, isn’t it? The cost is, as you say, the payload. Absolutely. And launch has been coming down drastically over the past 5 to 7 years, the cost to get onto orbit, and the failure rates have been drastically lower, notwithstanding a couple of recent blips. But of course, the smaller you can make your satellites, the more capability you can jam-pack into that payload, the better off you will be from a cost perspective. What used to be the size of a van and cost a significant amount of capital to get into orbit can now be packed into something the size of a toaster oven and cost maybe $500,000 to $750,000 to launch. And it will be even lower in the next few years as a couple of new launch vehicles come online. So it’s a very exciting time to continue to create this democratization of space. One of the things it does is it starts to reduce the barriers to entry, right? So, you know, every venture capitalist and every entrepreneur looks for “whitespace” to build new companies and create new industries. And I think low Earth orbit is very viable as attractive whitespace, not only because there’s not many capabilities on orbit today, but there is significant competitive advantage. And once you have an asset on orbit, orbit, it’s difficult to replicate that. There’s risk and there’s cost, etc. And as some of these space launch vehicles come on orbit or come available to the industry, some of that protective barrier behind us will start to drop.
Speaker B: And that’s interesting. John Serafini of Allied Mines looking to put some of his investor dollars into something tangible in space. And the opportunities are coming thick and fast because of the ready market in data that highly accurate, high-definition satellites can now generate. It’s something that Dr. Gail Milin-Chalabi and two colleagues from Manchester University won the Copernicus Master Sustainable Living Challenge for. They’d engaged in work that had created a system that can monitor UK wildfires and repair their peat bogs. All work that could not be done without accurate satellite data.
Speaker C: But here’s Dr. Milen Chalabi to tell us more. Well, hopefully we can start to save the water companies and conservation groups time, money, and effort in terms of they don’t have to be sending people out to certain areas. We can do that remotely. We can obviously feed that into government government policy as well by having a better understanding of wildfire regimes for the UK. We can also provide information to kind of academia for looking at doing carbon accounting and, and for research, so looking at just how much carbon dioxide is truly being released from these peatland ecosystems.
Speaker A: See, with that information being fed into the government with the—
Speaker B: and the relevant bodies, that means then people can get a handle on it.
Speaker C: Exactly, yeah, and also hopefully as well be able to better manage if a wildfire does occur as well.
Speaker A: When you say better manage, how do you mean? Do you mean that you can develop a policy to deal with it?
Speaker C: Yeah, and also it’s providing that evidence base so that wildfires are actually seen as a real hazard in the UK. There’s a lot of media attention on flooding, and rightly so. But obviously, with the way global temperature changes, there’s going to be an increased temperature in the next, say, 30 years. Then the wildfire hazard also is a real potential risk for this country.
Speaker A: Does that mean that you can also mitigate flooding because healthy peat bogs will lock up water?
Speaker C: Yes, Yes, so for example, if you’ve got degraded peatland, that’s obviously going to increase the speed of runoff. So if you are revegetating these upland areas, they basically will hold the water and slow down runoff. So yes, you’re right, also it can have the added benefit of preventing flooding further downstream of these catchments.
Speaker A: So it will also mean, because obviously if you’re reseeding peat by peat bogs, if you’re actually developing and allowing them to grow again, that you’re beginning to start to lock up carbon dioxide, because people aren’t really aware of how much carbon dioxide peat bogs lock up.
Speaker C: Exactly, yeah.
Speaker A: Carbon, yeah, that’s right. Okay, now this is one use of the satellite technology.
Speaker C: Can you see others? For radar, yeah, also fracking as well. So looking at surface deformation caused by fracking. That’s going to be obviously something of a growing concern in the UK in years to come. So yeah, you could use InSAR techniques for looking at the amount of movement of the ground caused by fracking, and I believe there’s a company, Geomatic Ventures, that’s already looking into this at the University of Nottingham.
Speaker A: Because a lot of people have said, well, this huge growth in, in satellites It’s all going to be involved in telecommunications. It’s all going to be involved in allowing people to get the internet anywhere in the world. But what you seem to be saying is, yeah, but hang on, there’s all of these other uses that we haven’t even thought about where we can use this technology to monitor what’s going on in the world.
Speaker C: Exactly. So these are the new potential downstream services that can come from these very large programmes like the Copernicus programme run by the European Commission, these are the types of now applications that are coming up downstream that are harvesting the use of this kind of technology and different kinds of satellite sensors that they’re launching year on year.
Speaker A: So the fact that, I mean, for example, Airbus is putting together a system called OneWeb which I think involves 650 microsatellites, then their aim is to provide this connectivity all over the world. But one of the other things that you’re saying is, yeah, but with all of these satellites, the other thing that we can actually do is start to see what’s actually going on in the world in very fine detail.
Speaker C: Yeah, I think it’s fantastic what the European Commission have done in terms of now having this open data policy. So in the past you would have had to have paid per scene for any satellite image that you were using. This has now really enabled small medium enterprises and companies to use the data free of charge and then add value to it and then sell that on as a service.
Speaker B: So a system that helps the environment and could help cut a national bill of £71 million a year due to the damage caused by wildfires. And other, more exotic ideas are also now possible because of the satellite revolution, such as Asgardia, an off-planet nation which its founders say will be based on a satellite and seek to raise awareness of human rights, particularly human rights in relation to space, because, say its founders, space should not only be conflict-free it should also belong to everyone, which is not a view shared by the Chinese government or the US billionaire Robert Bigelow, who are both anxious to open a discussion on how to own parts of the moon and Mars. It’s that sort of bone age thinking that Lena de Wynne, one of the founders of Asgardia, says that we should leave on planet Earth.
Speaker A: She told me, Well, it consists of 3 parts. The first part is the philosophical, the way I have explained. It’s a philosophy of unification into a human nation, and since the Earth is split into individual nations, it’s only natural that the human nation has a basis above the Earth. In legal terms, and there is plenty of work for very good lawyers to be done in the coming years, but in legal terms, it’s a piece of something which we call a country. A country can be 1 square meter, the country can be something else, and it can be above the Earth’s surface. So we are going to apply to the United Nations to be recognized as a country. So that’s the legal aspect. And in technical sense, like I said, it’s a piece of hardware, a satellite, a satellite which will be launched in about a year, maybe a little bit more. Very soon. And this is a satellite which will symbolize, uh, location what Asgardia is. And in terms of technical evolution, it’s an open architecture platform.
Speaker B: Okay, I— there once was a, um, I think it probably still exists, a, um, a, a contrick called, um, I think it was the, um, the, the province of Zorkia or or something like that, which was a— it’s basically a geographical position off the coast of somewhere in the Caribbean. I mean, won’t some critics say, hang on, this is exactly the same idea, you’re getting people to sign up to a nominal country that doesn’t yet exist?
Speaker A: I don’t see it as a criticism. I see it as a recognition of what we are doing. Yes, we are inviting people to apply to be involved with Edgardia, and by collecting this interest, by showing an absolutely unprejudiced open call that people are interested in this, we are going to represent their interests, take them forward to the United Nations. So I don’t see this as a critique. I see it as a recognition of what we are doing.
Speaker B: It’s exactly what we are doing. Okay, so I’m obviously people will sign up to this ideal, and then in a year’s time there will actually be a physical manifestation of it up in space. There’s a lot of pressure now on space, isn’t there? People don’t think this because we are not yet used to the idea, but there’s a lot of people who are suddenly saying, hang on, I’ve got an interest in space and I’m going to do something. And hitherto it’s been the province of the very rich, the Richard Bransons of this world, the Elon Musks isn’t it?
Speaker A: Well, it’s not a problem, it’s an evolution step. Would you say that in the 15th century when Columbus sailed to America, it was the problem of the rich that an average Spanish peasant could not join him on his cruise ship? And where would we be today with our weekend hop shopping to New York if into the 15th century Columbus didn’t sail off to India and by accident arrived in America?
Speaker B: So is that part of the idea, that this— you see this as a democratization? You see this as being something that not just great plutocrats can do, everybody can do it?
Speaker A: One day, yes, but we are realistic. We have to start somewhere, and it will take time to evolve. When Jules Verne in the 19th century wrote his science fiction novels about launching people to the moon from a massive cannon gun, They also thought him crazy. Nobody thought that now in the space museums all over the world, in the hall of space history, this would be the first graphic picture to show the first step, what inspired a real scientist to build rockets.
Speaker B: Here in London at the Royal United Services Institute, about a month and a half ago, there was a conference on the militarization of space, on the militarization of satellites. Satellites, because that is becoming an issue. And it’s not a question of actually launching the satellite. Satellites can actually be moved while they’re in space and placed next to another satellite, which in a sense is what you’re drawing attention to, isn’t it? You’re drawing attention to the fact that space belongs to everybody and not just these big players.
Speaker A: Well, we certainly consider that space is an extended part of Earth’s environment and of life on Earth. If we come back to level 1 philosophical meaning of Asgardia, then yes, the space belongs to the entire humanity and every person is entitled to be associated with space and benefit from the fact that humankind can reach out into space.
Speaker B: Lena Dewyn on the world’s first off-planet nation, an idea that will definitely be expanded on. 16 years ago, the LSE’s Professor Ian Angel predicted that satellite-based off-planet tax havens would develop, something that is now highly likely. Though José Freitas of Critical Software, a company that has worked on space projects with NASA, says that there is much more to space and that our lives and our futures are now inextricably bound in with its development.
Speaker A: I mean, I think the possibilities are— I wouldn’t say endless, but depends on the imagination of entrepreneurs. The most obvious that we’ve seen is Earth observation, and there are already some startups exploring those types of missions. But you will also probably see tracking of aircraft from space using small satellites and even nanosatellites. Tracking of ships is already being done. Weather applications, research, even communications. The communications, it’s still a little bit more difficult, but I believe that in 5 to 10 years we’ll see probably some Internet of Things connected devices using satellite technologies based on this small platform. So I think it really depends on the imagination and the skills of both the existing companies and the new startups. Livestock monitoring, I mean, there are lots of things that you can track with small devices.
Speaker B: So I think we will really observe a revolution in this field in the next few years. So this of course will mean that there will be, because there’s so many more devices, there will be so many more signals. That is going to have to be a challenge, isn’t it?
Speaker A: Exactly. That’s a concern for regulatory authorities. I mean, the communications need to be synchronized by the ITU and the national agencies, communications agencies. This is a pretty regulated area. Regulated domain, and of course there will be some trade-offs between what bands can be allocated to space technology and ground technology. But what I think is that space technology doesn’t need to be an alternative to ground technology. But of course this all needs to be regulated, both in terms of frequency allocations for the communications as well as the space debris, because we need to monitor pretty well tell what objects are orbiting Earth, and it needs to be taken into account.
Speaker B: Regulation is a key word here, isn’t it? Lots of people are saying that there is no regulation, it’s an unregulated space. That might be attractive for some people, but nonetheless there is a need for regulation. I think there is.
Speaker A: The issue of satellites, it’s— I mean, you don’t have frontiers in space. A satellite in, in low Earth orbit will, will cross boundaries of different countries. I mean, so It’s a common asset of different countries, so you really need international agreements on how to regulate these problems, and you need to enforce those regulations as well. And this will become more critical as we send more spacecraft to space. And we see nowadays launches with 10, 50, 20 satellites, small satellites in a single launch.
Speaker B: So this is a big issue. That was Jose Freitas of Critical Software pointing out that inevitably, because of the discord that is developing over the exploitation and ownership of space, that it was inevitable. That was Jose Freitas of Critical Software pointing out that inevitably, because of the discord that is developing over the exploitation and ownership of space, that it was inevitable that there would need to be more regulation. An odd notion, but one it made sense to know more about. There have been laws governing space since 1967, according to Joanne Wheeler, a space law expert for the London lawyers Bird Bird. Though, like José Freitas, she thinks there might be the need for an overhaul.
Speaker C: It’s a competitive world. It’s a competitive state world. Satellites can be used for aggression and military purposes. And therefore, if this continues, and based on my comments about sustainability of space, we may need another UN resolution to deal with these anti-jamming and these aggressive tactics.
Speaker B: One of the points that was made by Patricia Lewis of Chatham House was that she said she would like to see cybersecurity on every satellite that is now launched, given the fact that the one problem with, with satellites is getting them out of the Earth’s atmosphere and that any additional weight is a, is an issue. Um, do you think that that’s something that’s viable? I mean, she says that we need to have cybersecurity on satellites because of the potential damage that could be done via a satellite that wasn’t in the control of the people who were meant to be controlling.
Speaker C: There are regulations to deal deal with space debris, mitigate space debris and its effects. Those regulations may lead to larger costs for operators, but we’re dealing with that to put it on an international level playing field. Now, the same applies to cybersecurity and anti-jamming technologies. Increasingly, and I’ve seen this at UK Space meetings, the industry body, we’ve had cybersecurity experts come to speak at the UK Space meetings UK space meetings. This is an increasing issue. It will need to be dealt with by international standards that cover this on a level playing field. But I do see more standards coming in there, also in regard to space debris and dealing with anti-satellite jamming missions.
Speaker B: Because one of the other potential things that you could do with a cyber attack, if you were successful, is is put a satellite either out of orbit or into a graveyard orbit.
Speaker C: Yeah, no, I was approached a few years ago by an interesting company that wanted to, um, remove space debris. And this company wanted to nuzzle up to other satellites, latch onto them, and move them out into graveyard orbits or bring them down so they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. This company also had the ability to take photos of satellites. Now, I’m afraid I had to damage their business plan just a little bit by saying, well, under international law, you’re going to need the consent of any state that owns that satellite or whose private entity owns that satellite to take a photo of it, to nuzzle up to it, to attach to it, and to deorbit it. Those satellites are owned by the launching state., and their presence in outer space is not affected by that ownership. And therefore, if you touch or seek to control another satellite, you will need the consent of that state. Now, this technology does exist to latch onto other satellites, to deorbit them, et cetera. And quite a few companies are using that technology for in-orbit servicing purposes. Now, while I’m very much in favor of in-orbit servicing, sort of thing, it needs to be controlled and licensed very carefully because of exactly the aspects that you’re mentioning.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that was the point that was made to us by Alice Bun, that she said that obviously any satellite that could do that very, very useful thing could also do something that might not be considered very useful by a particular state, that it could be used aggressively.
Speaker C: Correct. So if you’re taking photos of another satellite, or videoing it to attach to it to provide in-orbit servicing, what is the difference between that and surveillance or some aggressive maneuver? Now, the difference is the consent of the satellite owner that you are attaching to. But if you did not have that consent and you were taking a photo or a video or attaching to, for example, a UK operator attaching to a Chinese satellite, what is the difference between that and, pardon me, a very aggressive act?
Speaker B: That was Joanne Wheeler of Bird and Bird on whether or not anyone should own space and fight there. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just turned on, I’m afraid you’ve missed it, but we’ll be back again on the second Wednesday of next month.
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