Acknowledging Space Systems As 'Critical Infrastructure'.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: ANALYSIS

The Department of Homeland Security has a list of 16 critical infrastructure sectors it considers "so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof."

The industries and sectors are: chemical, communications, dams, emergency services, financial services, government facilities, transportation, commercial facilities, critical manufacturing, the defense industrial base, energy, food and agriculture, healthcare, nuclear reactors and water systems.

That exhaustive list would just about cover everything, one would think, but there is an increasing chorus wondering why space systems are not included.

That question came up several times during the recent Satellite 2022 conference, which took place in Washington, D.C., in mid-March.

"We are facing incredible threats," said Pete Hoene, president and CEO of SES Government Solutions, a subsidiary of SES, a telecommunications services pro vider headquartered in Luxembourg.

There are "a wide variety of other issues that are coming into the fold here as we see what's happening in Ukraine," he said at the conference.

The annual trade show is mostly devoted to the commercial space sector: the multinational satellite communications companies, and increasingly businesses that sell remote sensing data and images.

A walk down the aisle of the exhibit hall demonstrated the industry is much more than the companies that provide global telecommunications: it's the satellite manufacturers, the small businesses that supply subsystems, the launch companies, ground-station servicers, and cybersecurity providers.

Many of these companies didn't exist two decades ago when DHS was conceiving its critical infrastructure list. The oft-repeated refrain at this conference and the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs was that Home Depot attracted more investors every year than the entire space sector.

But that changed in a hurry beginning with the then virtually unknown Elon Musk, who declared that he would take the $ 1 billion or so he earned selling his share of PayPal and start SpaceX.

Others followed suit. The National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency declared that it would buy space imagery from private sector companies. Remote sensing was once the purview of the military and spy agencies and less secretive NASA and NOAA for Earth observation. The...