Stellar Deception: Disinformation’s Threat to Effective Space Incident Response

Over seven days in April 1970, Gene Kranz solidified his legend in the long history of legends at NASA. Kranz was the flight director credited with bringing the Apollo 13 astronauts home after a near-catastrophic equipment failure. Kranz’s quick and decisive thinking in the face of unclear and incomplete information led to a series of solutions to the right problems at the right moments, bringing the astronauts to a soft splashdown in the Pacific near a waiting USS Iwo Jima. However, imagine a scenario where Kranz was uncertain whether the information was actually coming from the crippled spacecraft, where he had even the slightest doubt in the veracity of the information he was receiving. 

The Apollo 13 disaster occurred in an era when cybersecurity was an afterthought. Today, the cybersecurity of space systems combined with the proliferation of disinformation campaigns creates an environment where the responses to incidents in space could be slowed just enough for critical lifesaving decisions to be delayed—or for decisions to be made on misleading information with potentially catastrophic results. The increasing complexity of our low-Earth-orbit (LEO) environment, combined with the militarization of the space domain by major powers, all but assures that disinformation in the space domain will be a factor in space incident response. 

Read the full article at AFCEA International’s Signal Media: https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/cyber-edge/stellar-deception-disinformations-threat-effective-space-incident-response