Golden Dome Faces Cyber Risks in Space-Based Defense

At a 2025 capture‑the‑flag event in Las Vegas, teams using radios and laptops seized functional control of a simulated government satellite, demonstrating how readily space systems can be infiltrated. The exercise, STARPWN, developed with SIXGEN, highlighted attack paths that can redirect payload behavior and lock out operators in real time.

Golden Dome, the proposed national missile- and cruise-missile‑defense architecture, will rely on tightly coupled, software‑defined space assets, relay networks, ground processing pipelines, and command-and-control links. That interdependence creates non-kinetic attack surfaces: adversaries can target timing, data integrity, telemetry trust, or update mechanisms to induce delays, misalignment, or ambiguity that look like benign anomalies.

To avoid a system that performs in tests but collapses under contested conditions, cyber must be a core engineering discipline. Cyber requirements should be owned by chief engineers and integrated from concept through Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews. Redundancy is not equivalent to security; architectures must detect, isolate, and operate through manipulations, validated by red teams and cyber fault injection during developmental testing.

Investment portfolios should fund non-kinetic cyber and EW capabilities and require authenticated telemetry, secure updates, and cyber-instrumented avionics. Ambiguity should be treated as a signal, not noise. The decisions made now will determine whether Golden Dome is resilient or fragile for decades.