A decade is a long time in the space industry. In 2017 there was no Starlink or Amazon Leo; no commercial synthetic aperture radar constellations; and U.S. astronauts had to fly on Soyuz rockets to get to the International Space Station.
But in space cybersecurity, a decade is a lifetime, or even more. Indeed, the first Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy in September 2018 seems to have been the first-ever public U.S. government policy document to specifically mention the need to defend the nation’s space assets against hackers, online spies, and cyberwarfare. It was followed two years later by a White House space policy directive, SPD-5, which laid out the broad outlines of a cyber defense strategy for the space sector.
But these publications were only the visible tip of a long-standing and growing iceberg of concern behind the scenes, at least at the Pentagon, says Bob Gourley, a former Naval intelligence officer with a long career in technology in and out of the Department of Defense.
A DoD-contracted team of private sector red team hackers had mounted successful cyberattacks against U.S. assets on orbit as far back as the late 1990’s, recalls Gourley, who was the J-2 (director of intelligence) at the time for the Joint Task Force – Computer Network Defense, the U.S. military’s first-ever cyber defense organization.
But the conversation was restricted to “the high side” — meaning the issue was only being debated in classified spaces between cleared individuals.
