The Space Digital Dome: Autonomous Defense of Space Vehicles from Radio Frequency Interference

While awareness of active threats is critical to space vehicles, action is required to avoid harm. Physical hazard avoidance requires orbital manipulation using propulsion, whereas options for avoiding or nullifying radio frequency interference (RFI) are less straightforward. Because these actions need to occur on the space vehicle in real-time despite limited computing capacity and power on the edge, actions need to be reliably assessed and planned with readily available resources. The space vehicle will need to make fully or partially autonomous decisions to defend its communication channel and ensure mission resilience. This paper proposes an architecture to facilitate the autonomous defense of space vehicles from radio frequency attacks. Further, the paper aims to promote the broader discussion of mechanisms to defend space vehicles from cyber, kinetic, electromagnetic and other attacks.

1. Introduction

Despite increasingly aggressive nation state activity in space, the US has largely deferred to “naming and shaming” as a response. For example, in 2020, Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the US Space Force mentioned to Time Mag-azine that a Russian satellite was tailing a US spy satellite²

https://time.com/5779315/russian-spacecraft-spy-satellite-space-force/

. While this incident and others similar have stopped short of escalating to kinetic conflict, it is likely that foreign space-craft are leveraging tools on the radiofrequency spectrum to eavesdrop on and interfere with U.S. assets. This raises the question: can we develop non-kinetic response capabilities for space systems?