Inflation has been impacting everyone everywhere, from the housing market to the space industry. This has an impact on the space industry by increasing the price of launches in the last year.
Prices have been at a steady increase over the prior year, a great example of the spike would be SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles that has been consistently increasing each year about roughly 8 – 10%, from $1 million to $1.3 million for a 200 – kg rideshare satellite. The spike in price isn’t only impacting SpaceX but also other launch vehicle providers.
A program normally has a dedicated budget that accounts for all of the deliverables to the customer together, with the increase in price for the launch vehicle This has a potential significant impact on the mission, program, and cybersecurity because with the hiked increase in price due to inflation, there will be some areas that will experience budget cuts or cutting corners to meet deadlines, dates, requirements, verification, and many more. There isn’t that much cybersecurity that is currently present on spacecrafts that has changed from previous missions. Continuing to use the same methods, such as: modulation, encryption, decryption, different phase shift keying, and other methods.