This week the space industry saw the first successful private spacewalk from an all civilian crew on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission. The team returned to earth after a 5 day LEO orbit at 740km, the highest altitude humans have traveled since the Apollo mission’s trips to the moon. The crew consist of a billionaire tech entrepreneur, who actually funded the mission, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot. The mission and its success has been referred to as “a landmark” signaling performing space activities are not just for government agencies and paving the way for other commercial companies to lead space exploration activities. SpaceX’s new spacesuit design was used for the short spacewalk, approximately 30 minutes. The suit is slated to be used for future missions.1
This is a great step for space exploration and does set the stage for civilian involvement in future missions, such as the lunar gateway, the next generation ISS, on orbit satellite repairs, lunar colonies, as well as asteroid and mars exploration missions. A lot of imagination is not needed to envision a future were civilians are continuously going in and out of outer space. It also isnt a stretch to see large commercial aviation companies brokering those spaceflights. Airlines such as United, Southwest, or other large company in that industry could soon join Virgin in making space accessible.
With that outlook on the future of the commercial space industry, the current airlines industry cyber security has recently been exposed in a ransomware attack on the port of Seattle. This now confirmed cyber attack took down the websites, email, and phone services used at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. This attack effected and delayed thousands of travelers.2 In space travel launches have to be planned well in advance as well as launches have specific time windows they have to hit. Often launches get scrubbed for long durations of time until conditions are correct again. As the space domain becomes more accessible, hopefully the cyber security lessons the aviation industry is learning are incorporated for space travel.
References
1. ‘Mission complete’: billionare returns to Earth after spacewalk – Ian Sample, Science editor for the Gaurdian
2. Port of Seattle confirmed that Rhysida ransomware gang was behind August attack – Pierluigi Paganin, securityaffairs.com