APOGEE STAFF
When the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) destroyed a ballistic missile headed for Israel’s southernmost town of Eilat on October 31, 2023, it triggered worldwide media chatter about a new era of space warfare. That’s because the intercept — according to multiple media outlets but never confirmed by the IDF — potentially occurred above the Kármán line, an invisible boundary 100 kilometers above sea level considered to be the beginning of space. Another point of interest was that the aggressor was not some great power with arsenals of space weapons but rather an Iran-funded military and political organization in Yemen called the Houthi movement, which has garnered notoriety for attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea.
The Houthis attacked again on September 15, 2024, and for the first time reached Israel with a ballistic missile. The missile disintegrated after Israel activated its air defenses, but experts said the incident showed the heightened threat the Houthis can pose. An Israeli military official said the missile was hit by an interceptor and fragmented in the air but was not destroyed, Reuters reported.
Experts who study space-related defense issues say the Houthi attacks were not a new era of space warfare but rather a continuation of a decades-long trend of nonstate actors operating in space. Malicious nonstate actors — including terrorist groups, militant organizations and even lone hackers — have been doing harm for years using space-enabled technology, including off-the-shelf satellite imagery and GPS. The democratization of space — cheaper, smaller, easier-to-access technology — opens the door for lesser-funded players with bad intent. “Space is no longer the domain of only state actors for several reasons,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, professor of strategy and security studies at Air University, told Apogee by email. “First, as innovations in space technology have come online (standardized CubeSats, commercial off-the-shelf technology, reusable rockets), the price of getting to and operating in space has come down, enabling more actors generally to enter the space domain, most primarily commercial space companies.”
As commercial space companies multiply, she added, they provide more services and drive down costs. “Space-based information is becoming even more widely available, things which non-state actors including terrorist groups can take advantage of (for example, remote imaging or easier communication).” Those technologies are in addition to GPS, which became fully operational in 1993 and is frequently used by militant groups.
The fact that the IDF intercept potentially occurred in space attracted attention from the U.S. Congress and around the world. “On October 31, 2023, Iranian-sponsored Houthi terrorists launched a ballistic missile from Yemen intended to strike Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East,” wrote U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “The missile flew almost 1,000 miles over the Arabian Peninsula until it was intercepted by Israeli Defense Forces. This successful interception occurred outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, making it the first recorded instance of space warfare during an active conflict.”
Although there have been many missile-on-missile intercepts in space during technology testing, this is believed to be the first involving adversaries, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell told Gizmodo, a technology website. Tomas Hrozensky, a senior research fellow at the European Space Policy Institute, told Gizmodo that there is “currently insufficient information available” to say whether the intercept occurred in space. However, mid-range ballistic missiles can fly well above 100 kilometers, and the Arrow 2 system used by Israel to destroy the missile “is considered as a de-facto counterspace capability due to its nature of high-altitude interceptions,” he added.
Case Studies
One thing most experts agree on is that the prevalence of nonstate actors operating in space will only grow. Just as countries have found strategic advantage in technological feats such as GPS, militant groups have used the more readily available space technology to further their agendas, too. A 2021 report by U.S. Army Maj. Paul R. Kellmurray for the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies summed up three case studies outlining the exploits of what he termed “malicious non-state space actors.”
2006: The Israel-Hezbollah war was an early example of a nonstate actor using space power to battle a militarily superior opponent. The terror group used space-enabled technology to explore gaps in Israel’s defense by deploying Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles guided by GPS. Hezbollah forced the IDF to revamp and improve its radar coverage along Israel’s northern border. Although the IDF shot down the drones before Hezbollah could launch rockets, the drones showed the agility that space-based technology can provide, Kellmurray wrote.
2008: Terror groups continued to use space-enabled reconnaissance and communication when 10 men carrying automatic weapons and grenades launched a multipronged terror attack in Mumbai, killing 174 people during violence at hotels, a hospital, a rail terminal and a movie theater. Although the instruments of attack were mainly automatic weapons, the attackers communicated with their handlers using satellite phones and used high-quality satellite imagery for reconnaissance. “The combination of reconnaissance assets and GPS enabled the execution of the operation comparable to the capability of a state actor,” Kellmurray wrote.
2014-2016: The Islamic State group (ISIS) relied heavily on space-relayed internet because much of Syria’s communication infrastructure had been destroyed by war. The space-enabled internet allowed ISIS to continue its worldwide recruitment despite heavy battlefield losses, and it also pioneered the use of low-cost drones equipped with GPS to conduct attacks.
As space becomes more congested, drones and phones are not the only areas of concern. “To this point, non-state actors likely pose little kinetic threat to assets currently on orbit,” Whitman Cobb said. “However, space systems are heavily dependent on two things that are vulnerable: the cyber domain and terrestrial ground stations. Like we saw with Russia’s attack on Viasat at the beginning of their Ukraine invasion, cyberattacks can impact space-based systems; as such, the low cost of entry in terms of perpetrating cyberattacks make them something that a terrorist group might easily undertake with the right resources.”
Even a small satellite at supersonic speeds can potentially be repurposed into a putative space weapon by an unscrupulous faction, especially if command and control of that satellite isn’t protected and encrypted.”
~ Yale University Professor Dov Greenbaum
Only an hour before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Russian government hackers targeted the U.S. satellite company Viasat, disrupting Ukrainian military communications. And even before the Viasat attack, hackers had breached satellites around the world. Yale University Professor Dov Greenbaum, an intellectual property lawyer who studies the impacts of science on society, wrote in August 2022 for the technology website CTech that the Falun Gong religious movement in China hacked transmissions from Chinese satellites in 2002 and 2004 and that the Sri Lankan militant group, the Tamil Tigers, also hacked an Intelsat communication satellite in 2007. Branded a terrorist group by the U.S. government, the Tamil Tigers fought for decades to establish independence in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Authorities said they hijacked the Intelsat satellite to broadcast messages to their followers, Reuters reported.
Just as with the Iran-funded ballistic missile fired by the Houthis toward Israel, Greenbaum notes, state actors often use nonstate groups as proxies to achieve state aims. “State actors like Iran with proven space capabilities may be willing to facilitate these bad actors,” Greenbaum told Apogee in an email. He added that such groups could do more than simply jam or pirate a legitimate signal. “Even a small satellite at supersonic speeds can potentially be repurposed into a putative space weapon by an unscrupulous faction, especially if command and control of that satellite isn’t protected and encrypted,” he wrote.
Shoring Up Defenses
To harden defenses, the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Air Force have teamed up with hackers, sponsoring Hack-A-Sat competitions in which hackers compete for cash prizes to find vulnerabilities in satellites. An August 2023 competition in Las Vegas featured five teams of hackers trying to break into a Space Force CubeSat launched for the sole purpose of testing cybersecurity limits in space. “What’s important for us is bridging the gap between the cyber and space communities,” Rachel Mann, a deputy technology transfer manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory, told IT Brew, a technology website. “We feel that to have vulnerable systems going up into orbit is, of course, not ideal.”
Greenbaum noted that ground stations should also be heavily secured because security breaches at launch sites are a “real and constant fear,” adding that such a scenario was portrayed in “Contact,” a 1997 science fiction film. “We need to realize that there are many ways that actors of all types (state, non-state, violent or not) can affect space systems,” Whitman Cobb said. Ground stations are the most vulnerable link in the chain “not only because of their location but because the means of attack can be easily acquired. So, while we shore up cyber defense for space systems, space operators also need to remain vigilant of local security.”