Recent attacks on cloud facilities and ground-based satellite infrastructure have heightened concerns, that some of the space industry's most critical assets are becoming targets in today's conflicts. Despite that, that ground stations are a necessary link between satellites and users, they were overlooked for a long time, unlike orbital vehicles and rockets, which launch them into orbit.
This began to change in 2022 year after the cyberattack on the KA-SAT satellite Internet network of the Viasat company at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Hackers deployed malware through ground systems, which resulted in the failure of tens of thousands of broadband subscriber terminals across Europe, mainly in Ukraine. In March 2026 2006, a missile strike hit a commercial teleporter, owned by Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES in Israel, damaging part of the antenna field after Israeli and American military operations against Iran. Amazon Web Services, an American giant of data centers, reported drone strikes on its infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
All of these incidents underscore a broader shift: in the era, as commercial space and cloud networks are increasingly integrated into military operations, infrastructure, which accepts, processes and distributes satellite data, is attracting new attention as a vulnerable point for attacks. For satellite and ground station operators, this prompts a more careful study of redundancy, protection and whether assets are required, which were previously considered commercial support, now treated as part of the battlefield.
French startup Skynopy and other ground station providers point out, that geographically diverse infrastructure is increasingly important for operational sustainability, especially with the transition of the space industry to dual-purpose systems, which support as commercial, and defense applications. Skynopy has developed software for routing satellite data through a network of 17 ground stations, which allows traffic to be redirected to an alternate site in case of failures. Distributed networks also help reduce latency for time-sensitive applications, such as Earth observation. Skynopy demonstrated the effectiveness of satellite monitoring to SpaceNews, citing the example of operational fixation of a 64-kilometer military convoy, which was moving in the direction of Kyiv at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia. But it took time to transmit this data to analysts on the ground, as low-orbit spacecraft without intersatellite communications must wait, while flying over an approved ground station, to load data. Skynopy notes, that for architectures with a limited number of sites, the delay is usually 90 minutes or more, excluding the processing of data to transform it into usable intelligence. However, the startup claims, that satellite operators can reduce the download delay to around 20-40 minutes, using a more geographically diverse network of ground stations.
Founded in 2015 US-based Atlas Space Operations is taking a similar approach to sustainability, using software to connect operators to a federated network with over 34 land sites around the world. Atlas founder and CTO Brad Bode noted, that traffic redirection is not the main problem when the site crashes, because software-defined networks can reroute satellite channels in near real-time over a distributed infrastructure. The main obstacle is regulatory. Ground stations must be licensed to transmit data to specific satellites and these licenses are geographically limited. Satellite operators should plan for more licensed sites, than they expect to use, and regulators need to move faster to implement more flexible and responsive licensing models.
Large groups, such as SpaceX's Starlink, increasingly use intersatellite communications to transmit data in space and reduce dependence on ground infrastructure in general. Commercial groups for data relay are also being developed, to provide similar opportunities to smaller operators. However, as countries invest in anti-satellite weapons and other counterspace capabilities, moving more of the network into orbit could shift the risk, rather than eliminate it. Even limited attacks in orbit can create cascading debris, which would potentially harm broader space operations and services, that depend on them. Keeping data flowing during a crisis can depend on no less than that, how well nodes can survive failures, than from their number and location.
Source: https://spacenews.com