Space Security

In the vast silence of space, security is anything but quiet. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cutting-edge science and strategic defense converge to protect the satellites we rely on.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  En 2009, deux satellites ont parcouru des milliers de miles par heure sur des orbites régulières dans le large de l'espace. L'un était un satellite de communication actif. L'autre était un satellite de cosmos défoncé, driftant, russe. Un relique obsolète qui se déplace silencieusement dans l'orbite. Puis, l'impact. Les deux satellites ont collidez. Un accident qui a envoyé des milliers de fragments de débris qui s'envolent dans l'orbite de la Terre. Le débris a étendu rapidement, menaçant les satellites opérationnels et forçant la station spatiale internationale à ajuster son courant pour éviter les impacts potentiels. Le déchets sont toujours flottant dans l'espace,

• 0:47Speaker 00

  ajoutant à la croissance des nuages de déchets spatiaux qui pose un risque aux satellites, aux stations spatiales et aux missions futures. La collision a servi comme un appel de réveil pour l'industrie spatiale, soulignant les risques à long terme de failures de satellites incontrôlés. Les scientifiques ont réalisé qu'ils avaient besoin de pratiques plus durables dans l'orbite. Les satellites sont cruciaux à la vie moderne. Ils puissent élever les réseaux de communication, élever le GPS, soutenir les transactions financières et jouer un rôle vital dans la sécurité nationale. Et comme l'espace devient plus dense et contesté, protéger ces systèmes essentiels est crucial.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Aujourd'hui, nous allons explorer le monde caché de la sécurité spatiale, où les technologies avancées et le planning stratégique travaillent pour protéger notre infrastructure moderne.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Bienvenue dans le Big Ideas Lab, votre exploration hebdomadaire à l'intérieur du laboratoire national Lawrence Livermore. Entendez des histoires incontées, rencontre des pionniers qui avancent les limites et obtenez un accès non parallèle à l'intérieur des portes. De la difficulté de la sécurité nationale à la révolution de la compréhension de la算 découvrez les innovations qui vont former demain aujourd'hui.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Space security is this idea that we need to find a way to operate in space despite another country trying to attack our space systems.

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  Ben Baney is the program leader for space at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I get a lot of questions about aliens. This is not, not what I work on. Not a thing.

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  Space is the backbone of our modern world. Protecting satellites and space-based infrastructure from threats, from cyber attacks to physical challenges, is a cornerstone of space security. It relies on advanced technologies and global collaboration to safeguard the critical systems that underpin our communication, navigation, and national defense.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I think for most people, space is this unseen set of capabilities, right? It's way up there. You can't see what's going on, but there's something important happening, right? There's something enabling happening there. That was the appealing thing about space is really understanding. There's this whole world out there. It's very complicated and very technical, but also really important.

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  This hidden complexity propels space development. Space is vast, mysterious, essential to how our world operates, and integral to modern life. Willem de Vries is an associate program leader for the Space Science and Security Program at Lawrence Livermore.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Traffic management in space is a real need, and so you have systems on the ground tracking objects as they move over, like with a radar. There's a lot of optical systems too, the little telescopes that track these things. And what our application is, is basically little satellites from space doing the same thing as the ones on the ground.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Awareness is the foundation of effective space management. Tracking objects in orbit ensures that traffic systems can operate safely and efficiently.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  We can talk about space domain awareness. So what is going on is a critical component. If you don't know what's going on, or who is there, or who's doing what, then even traffic management would be useless. So as more and more nations are fielding things in space, or flying things, and even the moon is getting crowded.

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  Experts at Lawrence Livermore are developing advanced technologies that track objects, help secure systems, and protect critical infrastructure.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  My program really focuses on space security. We also focus on building payloads for flight in space. So that could be a telescope, it could be some other subsystem that's going to actually need to be built, tested, qualified, and then to go to a spaceflight. There are so many different actors in space, so many countries, so many private companies, and there's so many different types of satellites now, many, many, many thousands.

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  The rapid growth in satellite launches has introduced new risks that require attention.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  People in the US military are very much worried about a future potential conflict with China in particular, but also potentially Russia. Those are both very serious and longstanding spacefaring nations, right? China and Russia have been flying satellites in space for many decades.

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  In 2021, China surpassed all other nations with a record 55 orbital launches. An orbital launch places a satellite, spacecraft, or other payload into a continuous path around the Earth. In the past two years, China has launched over 400 satellites, more than half for Earth observation. This pace demands effective space security measures.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  There are more and more things going on in deep space, in lunar orbit and beyond. The Chinese are also planning their own missions to the surface of the moon. They already have put rovers on the moon, they just return samples from the dark side of the moon. The Chinese have put a relay system around the moon to do communications. And so, our need to understand what's going on further away from Earth is also growing. And this is something that we literally have never really done before.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Back in the early 1980s amid Cold War tensions, researchers at Lawrence Livermore, under the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, pioneered innovative ways to defend the US from missile threats.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  We did do a lot of space security work in the 80s at Livermore. It really started up under what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative.

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  One groundbreaking project was Brilliant Pebbles, a network of small autonomous satellites working together as a distributed missile defense system to detect and intercept incoming ballistic missiles through kinetic impact.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  The idea behind Brilliant Pebbles was to field a whole series of satellites in space that had interceptors upon them. So this was like a vehicle in space that had a little sub-satellite that would come out and that would be able to target a missile in flight and fly out and intercept it. So just run into it. This was kind of the cornerstone of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and it was executed at Livermore.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Lawrence Livermore researchers created advanced sensors, optical systems, and tracking capabilities that could reliably detect missile threats in the vastness of space. As the Cold War ended in the early 90s, the Strategic Defense Initiative slowed down. Sensors developed for Brilliant Pebbles were repurposed for NASA's Clementine mission in 1994, which mapped the moon in higher resolution.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I think it was the first time that we found ice on the lunar poles.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  After that, space work at the lab slowed down, until China launched a missile in 2007.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  The 2007 Chinese Direct Ascent Anti-Satellite, or ASAT, test, was a Chinese military operation in which a missile was launched from the ground to intercept and destroy one of China's own weather satellites in low orbit.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  There was going to be a whole new set of demands from the US government about thinking about space security, thinking about how do we know what's going on in space? What we call space domain awareness.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  The test demonstrated China's ability to destroy satellites in space using ground-based kinetic missiles and raised concerns about space security globally. The impact with the satellite created thousands of pieces of orbital debris, heightening risks for other space operations, and prompting renewed focus on space debris management and defense systems.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Space is congested, competitive, and carries complex and dangerous risks. For example, kinetic weapons are missiles designed to destroy satellites. They shoot from the ground into space, targeting a satellite and destroying it on impact.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  There are ground-based direct ascent weapons, which is a jargon-y term for basically a missile that you keep on the ground. And then when you need it, you shoot it into space, generally point it at a satellite that you're trying to target. It would then go up, have a sensor that would acquire that target, and then literally just maneuver into the way and just kinetically impact it to destroy the satellite.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Then there are nuclear weapons, remnants of the Cold War, when the US and the Soviets developed nuclear-tipped interceptors for space. While they seem like relics of the past, they remain an extreme, but real, threat.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  From the early days of the Cold War, the very first counter-space weapon systems that the US and the Soviets thought about were nuclear-tipped interceptors, right? And that's, I think, in a very extreme set of cases, still very much a concern.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  But physical attacks aren't the only threats. Cyber attacks pose a silent but potent threat, where hackers can remotely hijack or disable satellites, causing widespread disruption to communication and navigation systems. Electronic warfare adds another layer of complexity, with jamming techniques that cut off signals, leaving essential systems blind and vulnerable.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  You could inject information into the communications on a satellite. So if the satellite is what's called a bent pipe, so if it's essentially getting information and transmitting it back out, you could change the data in that data stream, potentially.

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  Satellites also have systems to send and receive commands.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  So these are essentially antennas that are used to communicate to the satellite to tell it to do things. And so even in that kind of data stream, you can potentially get in there and give it spurious commands. And so you could actually also disrupt the satellite itself as opposed to the data stream that's going through it. So there's a wide variety of things in the space security bin, right? It's an incredibly broad topic.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  These dangers combine to make space a hazardous domain. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is at the forefront of defending space. Space security begins on the ground with powerful simulations.

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  With advanced modeling technology, researchers can create highly accurate virtual environments to predict potential space conflict scenarios and anticipate threats.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  We can use test capabilities. We can use modeling simulation capabilities on high performance computing to simulate the effects of potential space weapons that we're concerned about.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  While simulations help predict threats and safeguard space assets, effective space security also depends on precise observation. Tracking objects in orbit requires advanced optical systems, and capturing clear images comes with challenges. We think of space as dark and empty. But in orbit, light is everywhere, and brightness is a major challenge for optical systems. Here on Earth, where atmospheric scattering softens and spreads light, satellites in orbit experience direct, unfiltered exposure to the sun's intensity. This extreme brightness can overwhelm sensors, washing out images and reducing their ability to detect objects.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  You're flying around the Earth. Half the time, half your orbit, you're in the sun typically. So it's obviously pretty bright. So baffling, I get the baffle around the aperture of the telescope is really important.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Baffles are structures that shield the optics from excess light and prevent glare from interfering with the sensors. Controlling excess light is crucial for capturing clear images in space. Another invisible force that can disrupt satellite operations is radiation. Beyond the steady brightness of the sun, powerful solar events can send bursts of charged particles hurtling toward Earth, interfering with satellites, communications, and essential systems on the ground.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  One of the things that can cause these temporary outages is solar flares. There was one last year, a pretty violent one, a coronal mass ejection. And so a lot of particles come our way.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  In May 2024, the Sun released a powerful solar flare, the strongest in years, along with a coronal mass ejection, which is a massive burst of solar particles and magnetic energy. When these particles hit Earth's atmosphere, they triggered an intense geomagnetic storm. The effects were widespread. Satellites experienced disruptions, radio signals were affected, and auroras lit up the skies in places where they're rarely seen. Events like this highlight the risks solar activity poses to our technology. Fortunately, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory keeps constant watch,

• 14:08Speaker 00

  providing early warnings to help protect satellites and power grids from future solar storms.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  You see it actually happens that NASA has these solar dynamics observatories, satellite looking at the Sun, it's like, oh, well, something is coming. And then a day or so later, we get the blast. And again, those are all charged particles and the biscuit charger hanging up and satellites will either reboot or reset.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  When these high-energy particles reach Earth, they can disrupt satellites and even force them into emergency shutdowns.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  There was actually an outage there, some GPS satellites, some other things got put offline for a little bit. Then things like your phone doesn't know where it is, or the clocks start getting out of sync. And then things like banking and it's an amazing amount of interconnects there.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Space disruptions interfere with navigation, banking, and communication systems on Earth. As more objects crowd orbit, monitoring them requires more than human oversight. Artificial intelligence now plays a critical role in identifying space debris and predicting potential collisions.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  If you can train something to recognize cats, then, well, you can train something to recognize streaks, right? If a satellite moves through your field of view like a line, a streak. So things like that, it's a very interesting, fruitful field for research.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  By processing data onboard and sending down only the most critical information, AI reduces the strain on ground systems and enables real-time decision-making in space.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be nice if you just had an architecture out there of all these satellites looking at other satellites? Like, oh, that satellite's still doing what it's supposed to do. That one is still fine. This satellite moved. Or that's how it may get close to another one. Then just send down the alert, if you will, instead of all the raw images and then process that on the ground. It's just a lot of data that needs to flow.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  The race for space security is accelerating. As satellite systems grow more advanced, so do the methods to disrupt them. Lawrence Livermore is advancing AI-driven satellite tracking, quantum encryption, and rapid deploy optical systems to secure space and counter evolving threats.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  We're able to cut through and see across these different disciplines to be able to bring solutions to the hardest problems and to bring those forward.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Space is essential for exploration and for maintaining everyday systems. And space security ensures the stability and resilience of these critical networks by anticipating threats and staying ahead of emerging challenges. As space becomes more contested and complex, Lawrence Livermore's commitment to innovation and protection will be crucial in ensuring the safety and stability of our interconnected world.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a power grid dynamics engineer and a transmission grid engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering, and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing, and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov/careers, where big ideas come to life.

• 17:58Speaker 00

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• 18:21Speaker 00

  Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a Power Grid Dynamics Engineer and a Transmission Grid Engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering, and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing, and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov/careers, where big ideas come to life.