Weather forecasts, modern banking, international trade and GPS all depend on a fragile web of infrastructure extending from Earth's orbit to the ocean floor — a web that's largely unseen and, experts warn, increasingly at risk.
At a World Economic Forum discussion in Switzerland last week, space leaders and cybersecurity experts cautioned that the satellites orbiting Earth and the submarine cables crisscrossing the seabed — the hidden lifelines of modern society — are growing more vulnerable even as global reliance on them accelerates.
"People don't realize how dependent we are," Aschbacher said during the session on Jan. 21. "We have to catch up," he added, when asked whether enough was being done to protect the space infrastructure. "We have to do more."
More than 15,000 active satellites currently orbit Earth, many flying in constellations that provide internet and communications services. SpaceX's Starlink network alone accounts for more than 9,500 of them. If all proposed constellations now under regulatory review move forward, the total could swell to around 500,000 satellites by the late 2030s.
Together with roughly 600 submarine cables spanning the ocean floor, these systems underpin multiple aspects of modern life, supporting everything from navigation and weather forecasting to financial transactions, emergency response and military operations.
"They have two things in common," said Jessica Rosenworcel, executive director of the MIT Media Lab and former chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. "We don't think about them very often ... and they're both extraordinarily vulnerable."
Satellites face threats from tens of thousands of pieces of trackable space debris, as well as millions of untrackable fragments, space weather and cyberattacks. Submarine cables, meanwhile, can be damaged accidentally by marine life or deliberately targeted in geopolitical flashpoints, such as attacks in the Red Sea that interrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East last year, said Rosenworcel.
"The vulnerabilities are all shared," she said, "but our regulatory frameworks around the world are pretty dated."
Cybersecurity threats are already testing some of those frameworks, according to Robert Lee, the CEO of Dragos, a Washington D.C.-based cybersecurity company. Lee pointed to a thwarted cyberattack on Poland's energy grid last December, which Polish authorities linked to Russian intelligence services. Had it succeeded, the attack could have triggered a blackout, leaving nearly half a million people without heat during the height of winter, according to news reports.
In the space sector, NASA faced an average of one cybersecurity incident per day during a month-long government shutdown in 2019. More recently, ESA launched a criminal investigation after a series of cyberattacks led to the leak of hundreds of gigabytes of potentially sensitive data. The material, which appeared on dark-web forums, reportedly included the agency's proprietary software, authorization credentials and internal project documentation.
Despite the critical role played by data centers and energy grids, Lee said such infrastructure remains "massively underinvested" in cybersecurity resilience — an area "that gets very little attention." In at least one case, he added, a state-backed actor penetrated systems with the explicit intent to cause physical harm.
"We see a lot more than you'll ever see in the media," Lee said during the session. As more systems become interconnected both in space and on Earth, he cautioned that ignoring the "very-real scenarios that are already taking place" could mean "we can very much find ourselves in a world where we're causing societal harm by the very innovation that we're trying to capture."
Still, Lee stressed that effective defense is achievable. "It's not that we are trying to come up with some net-new innovations to keep ahead of the adversaries," he said. "Sometimes it's very basic."
In space, too, rapid growth of satellite constellations can improve redundancy and resilience. But that growth also increases congestion in orbit and raises the risk of collisions and debris incidents.
"This is one of those challenges which reflects on the fact that, very often, tech develops much faster than international laws and regulations that are supposed to govern it," Rafal Modrzewski, the CEO and co-founder of the Finnish radar-imaging company ICEYE, said during the session. "It is a problem that we will have to address as a community."
ICEYE recently signed a €1.7 billion ($2 billion US) contract with the German government to build a 40-satellite radar constellation, one of the largest single Earth-observation deals to date, according to Modrzewski.
Such capabilities are already reshaping how space-based data is used on Earth. In Japan last year, ICEYE's near real-time satellite data was used to accelerate insurance payouts during flooding, allowing compensation to be issued within hours based on detected water depth — sometimes even before affected residents had filed a claim, Modrzewski said.
"You didn't even know that your car was flooded and you had the money in your bank account," he said. "That's the type of future we're talking about — if we can build this infrastructure correctly."
Adding to the complexity, satellites themselves are becoming increasingly autonomous. Recent research has shown that satellites can now use AI to control their orientation in space without human input, reducing the time, cost and operational burden of directing them remotely. But experts say that autonomy also deepens reliance on orbital systems that must operate safely in an increasingly crowded and contested environment.
AI is already being used on the defensive side as well. For example, it was recently used to help protect space assets by identifying vulnerabilities in communication links between Earth and NASA spacecraft, closing a flaw that for three years left the agency's network exposed to potential exploitation. In a worst-case scenario, such vulnerabilities could have allowed attackers to intercept sensitive data or even seize control of spacecraft, including those involved in flagship Mars missions.
Other protective technologies are emerging alongside these software-based defenses. Georgia-based Atomic-6, for example, has developed "space armor" designed to protect onboard communications without interfering with radio signals. The technology has undergone extensive hypervelocity testing on Earth and is expected to face its first in-orbit trials this year.
And more than 100 countries have signed the Zero Debris Charter led by ESA, aimed at strengthening international cooperation to address the growing problem of space junk.
Still, these efforts are only the beginning, Aschbacher said. "We are on Day 1. A lot more needs to be done."
Reflecting on his own journey building a satellite with ICEYE co-founder Pekka Laurila — a project that eventually led to the company's launch — Modrzewski encouraged young people entering the space industry to pursue bold ideas.
"Go and do it," he said. "Solve the problems that are out there, and let's make this world a better place."
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