Most military planners agree that China will try to blind U.S. forces by disabling satellites early in a conflict. If Beijing succeeds, the United States will have trouble understanding, communicating within, and even navigating the battlefield. Even if the United States and its allies turn China’s satellites into orbital debris, Beijing can rely on terrestrial, naval, and airborne sensors and communications, since most of the kinetic fighting will be in its own region. Far from needing to employ lasers or hit-to-kill kinetic weapons against satellites, Beijing can do its greatest damage through cyberattacks.

Last May, the Air Force and Space Force held a “Hack-A-Sat” competition that showed how almost anyone with a decent antenna can communicate with an orbiting satellite. Far from the distant safe space it once was, the low-Earth orbit where most satellites reside is best thought of today as a giant data center where any adversary can install a new server right next to yours. In fact, there are many reports that China has done precisely this, with the objective of compromising or disabling our satellites when the time is right.

To defend against the cyber threat from Beijing, it is imperative that we use a fresh approach to space cybersecurity. Instead of treating space like the terrestrial internet, we need a new security system that reflects the distributed nature of all the individual systems in the satellite ecosystem—the “big data center in the sky.” This would require a national effort pairing government with business to ensure each piece of software in the space ecosystem is designed with its own security systems and permissions. This approach would go beyond the currently popular concept of “zero trust” software that is designed with security foremost in mind but still seeks to secure networks that have fundamentally insecure application software. That is an after-the-fact fix rather than a fundamental change to software design.