Battle Hardening Commercial Space

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Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

All right. Hey, good afternoon. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Cherry Galindo. I’m the Division Chief for the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve out at Space Systems Command in Los Angeles. I’m gonna be your moderator for today’s panel, battle-hardening commercial space, which is pretty near and dear to CASR’s core function. Our goal is to figure out, in working with industry, how do we surge, augment, and reconstitute our forces, leveraging what commercial has to offer? So battle-hardening is right in line with where we’re trying to go in CASR. Commercial space capabilities are becoming increasingly important to DOW operations. At the same time, commercial and government systems are more interconnected, software-defined, and more reliant on the cyber domain than ever before. Today, we’ll discuss what it means to harden the broader commercial and government enterprise and really get away from focusing on point solutions that target in silos and look at the enterprise as a whole between government and commercial. To that end, we have a strong panel of leaders representing commercial robotics, space strategy, enterprise technology, and missile warning and defense. I’ll ask each of you to provide a brief introduction with your company, your role, and your name, beginning with Kim.

Kimberly Chamblin:

Thank you, I’m Kimberly Chamblin. I’m director of the government division at Boston Dynamics. At Boston Dynamics, we make a variety of robotic products, including a ground robot, which you can see here called Spot. That’s a four-legged dog robot. And we’re also, of course, making Atlas, which is our humanoid robot. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jonathan Welch:

Awesome, thank you. I’m Dr. Jonathan Welch. I’m with SAIC. SAIC, we provide sustainment, modernization of systems, to include C2 systems, relocatable radar systems, and maintaining some of the global radar systems that we currently use today for missile warning and missile defense.

Travis Steele:

Hi everyone, thanks for being here. My name is Travis Steele. I work at Red Hat. My role is the chief architect and field CTO for defense. I have an emphasis on air and space forces. Red Hat is the leading world’s open source software technology provider, and we work in all facets of the Department of War, and glad to be here. Everybody, really excited to be here.

Ryan Roberts:

Ryan Roberts, I lead Deloitte at the intersection of space operations and cyber operations to include our own on-orbit assets and how we get after cyber defense in space. So really happy to be here, thanks.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

Awesome, and thanks you all for having us and giving us the opportunity to have this panel with you. So with that said, we’re gonna go ahead and get it kicked off. We’ll dive in, and since for us, it all starts with the threat, that’s where we’ll start as well. First question for Ryan. You’ve suggested the next global conflict may begin with the cyber attack against government or commercial space systems. How should this operating assumption change the way we protect and share information about the space enterprise?

Ryan Roberts:

Yeah, thanks, sir. And I think it first bears mentioning that the lines are blurred between a government space asset and a commercial space asset. And I think those lines are only gonna continue to blur. And you don’t have to go very far into the newspaper or online to see that there’s been some very recent cyber attacks against commercial space systems because of their impact on military operations. So I think we need to look at our enterprise as one unified mission outcome.

And we also need to think of space and the tyranny of the distance of space as not a good insulator from cyber attack. And that those satellites and the infrastructure that supports them on the ground, they are just other endpoints on our enterprise networks, and they deserve that level of cyber protection and cyber defense. And I think when you look at organizations like the Space ISAC, who’s trying to bring government, commercial, industry, not-for-profit, global together to share near real-time threats across that space enterprise, both cyber and non-cyber, I think that’s also a very important piece of the puzzle. We’ve got to be talking to each other more about the threats to space. Thanks.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

Yeah thanks, Ryan. And what I heard is we’re, and we already know this, like adversaries out there have already stated, if you’re a commercial company working with the government, they’re gonna consider you a valid target, right? And so that’s a paradigm, I think, that’s starting to make its way through, right? Like we kind of see space in that light already. And what you’re saying is not only that, but also that distance that we attribute to space is kind of leaving us protected in maybe like a more terrestrial sense. That’s a false protection when it comes to cyber because we’re still targets on orbit because of those endpoints, because of those infrastructure points that are terrestrial, right?

And so building from that, my next question is for Jonathan. How do we build an architecture that is unattractive to threats or in attacks?

Dr. Jonathan Welch:

Yeah, it’s a great question. And kind of from what Ryan was saying, when we look at our architecture, he said that you look at it as a mission. So for a long time that we’ve looked at each of our individual systems, we’ve hardened each of those individual systems, right? And we put that into part of a trusted architecture. Well, now we have to be a little bit more mission focused. So when we look at the mission and mission availability, not only with our military assets, but with our commercial assets, and looking at how those things can fill the gaps, the duplication of data that we have and all of that.

So taking that cybersecurity aspect, looking at the architecture as a whole, because you’re looking at the mission itself. So when you look at the mission itself, how does this commercial satellite feed into what a military satellite is doing, right? In a time of conflict, space is gonna be contested, cyber is gonna be hit, your ground stations are gonna be hit, your networks are gonna be hit, all of those things are gonna be hit. So individually protecting them is not good enough. You have to look at it from a mission perspective. And when we look at it from a mission perspective, we’re gonna lose assets in a time of conflict, no doubt about it. So how do we then reconfigure our networks? How do we set up our architectures where we have trusted data sources between the commercial world and the military world to be able to fill those gaps? And more importantly, being able to reconfigure those gaps.

So when we look at how we build that architecture, testing, of course, will come along with that. And when we look at how you have to test that, you have to start removing things from your capabilities. Take out a commercial asset, take out a ground station, bring relocatable radars in, and utilize even relocatable ground stations, because those things are all gonna be targets. So you have to be able to reconfigure your network on the fly to be able to understand when you lose something, how quickly you can reconfigure it and keep your mission operational.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

I appreciate that, Jonathan. I think the thread that you pulled on there is pretty central to CASR. And I think just anything, when you talk about DOW and conflicts, we’re gonna take losses. And when you’re working with commercial, one of the things that we have to think about with CASR, one of the challenges that we’re trying to solve is how quickly can we, one, integrate with commercial in a way that we may not have anticipated in a trusted fashion, that’s not gonna slow commercial down, but it’s also gonna be trusted by the warfighters. And how quickly can you bring that to bear in like a reconstitution scenario? What that touches on pretty nicely is the next theme that we’re gonna look at. It’s the supply chain resilience and policy. Because anytime you start talking about reconstitution on a large scale, immediately you’re gonna look at, well, where are we getting these parts? Are they just on a shelf? Are they magically gonna appear, right? Which we all know that’s not the case.

And so Kim, the next question’s for you. What policy changes should the government pursue now in partnership with the industry to strengthen supply chain resilience and avoid a single commercial supply chain?

Kimberly Chamblin:

Thank you. Yeah, I’m looking at things from the policy perspective. That’s part of my role at Boston Dynamics. And I’m not an engineer, but I spend a lot of time with engineers. And most of my end users aren’t interested in the details of our supply chain. They’re interested in what the capability can do and deliver and bring to them. When I tell them that I’m gonna have to wait six more months for a new delivery of thermal cameras because they’re on backorder, that’s a problem. So what we’re looking at now is how can we create coalitions of buyers and interrelated networks of people who are working on robotics?

For example, I’m a ground robot girl here at the Air Force and Space Force Conference, but it’s important because a lot of the components that we use for ground robots also affect outcomes for air assets. And we’re kind of going after the same types of things. So to get to the policy question, it has to do with how can we protect our relationships domestically? We learned from the UAS side that there was fragmented policy. So a lot of people had good ideas of what to do and how to help, but there wasn’t a national strategy. So our company is working really closely with AUVSI to create a more holistic policy to include supporting a national robotic strategy.

Another thing is, as we all know, there’s been an erosion of domestic supply, capabilities, development. We did some really good work during COVID, and I do believe our nation has come up with the established production where we need to in times of great crisis. But there’s also components that are really difficult for us to build here. We haven’t figured out what those are yet. It’s like, let’s have some discussions about cameras and actuators and different things that might be really relevant. And it’s not necessarily a Boston Dynamics robot problem. It’s a problem over a lot of portfolios that we could probably tackle with that coalition mindset.

And I think we also just need to like come to terms with the fact whether we’re adversarial with China or not, they have a lot of, we have a lot of dependence on them and other more adversarial partners in our supply chain. So we just need to be looking at that first and probably start there. Thank you.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

And you bring up a really good point. At some level in the supply chain, we all know that it’s gonna lead to a country or region that we may not have access to during conflict, depending on what that conflict is. So that’s always something at the forefront of mind when we’re talking about policy or supply chain resilience.

Another key point that you mentioned is there may be components or areas where we’re kind of overlapping utilization and we might not realize it. So one organization may be dependent upon that part that you mentioned, there was a camera and there’s another organization that may have to depend on that part. That’s a part of the component of the camera, right? And so without that policy, without that forethought, would we find ourselves in a World War II type of scenario where we have to mobilize the entire country, which we did, and that’s a way to do it, but is there a smarter way to do it with the policy and some of the suggestions you made so we could think about that ahead of time and make those changes?

So thank you for that. I thought that was really forward thinking. I will have a little pivot for my question to Travis. This is something that Jonathan mentioned. You said trusted data, and it kicked off a thought. So how can commercial and government systems share trusted data when communications are degraded or denied? Another consideration, and I know this is always at the forefront of your mind, is how can we, the government, make sure we’re not raising any additional barriers to entry that exist today from working with the government? How do we continue to take advantage of the speed of commercial?

Travis Steele:

Yeah, as you mentioned, space is a warfighting domain, so be recomposable to address the cyber reality, which is contested and denied. We have to have platforms that are open. We have to have standards that are open. And we have to have trust. And how do we achieve that trust? And the expectation of what we receive has provenance. It’s there for a reason. As we go from a augmented, or the military’s the core, those assets are the core. Now we need to augment those with commercial. How do I pass that data with the trust and the provenance that it needs, so it can take over in the fight? Whether it’s a track, a warning, or something else, right? An effector, for example. It needs to have the provenance with that.

You’ve got to build that from the start. When those birds go up, they have to have the policy baked in that allow you to work with it. It has to have the credentials that allow it to work when it’s denied. Because when the ground’s not there, right, when the signal’s jammed, or there’s too much data trying to be sent down back to the ground, we can’t rely on that. The mission can’t rely on that. And as you said, the mission has to move, right? So the functionality, the operational capability, it has to move. That’s the point of PLEO, the proliferated low Earth orbit, right? That’s how we get a warfighter architecture versus a bunch of hardened assets. Sure, you’ve got to start with the hardened first.

But the reality is, while we’re trying to live in the adversary’s OODA loop, they’re trying to live in ours, too. And in the high ground, that’s the most important OODA loop, in my opinion, right, that we are going to deal with going forward. And we have to think about it as an orbital OODA loop. The ground’s not there. It’s going to be denied. So our workload has to be software-defined. Those birds, the hardware, the exquisiteness of their capability needs to be really abstracted so that we can move the mission and those functionalities.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

I appreciate your thoughts on that. It is terrifying, the fact that we are going to go to a software-defined constellation by necessity. That’s just the way things are naturally driving towards. But also, it leaves us open to all sorts of different attacks or different vectors for attacks. So we always have to balance those two things, right? I don’t think closing ourselves off, it’s no longer an option. So how do we go forward in a smart way by leveraging what commercial’s already doing? So thank you for those thoughts.

Ryan, for our next question, I wanna kick it back over to you. As a former launch guy, I was very familiar with the payload. You made the payload, right? You have a long integration pathway to launch, and there’s a lot of checks and balances because once you launch that mission, it’s gone, right? You don’t have on-orbit mechanics just yet. So leading up to that point and kind of pulling on that thread, you postured this idea of a cyber-cleared-for-flight requirement that we can apply to satellites. Can you expand on that and just give the audience a couple of concrete examples or just some of your thought behind what you’re putting forward there?

Ryan Roberts:

All right, as long as I can have like a quick therapy session with my cyber tribe, right? So, you know, my fellow cyber warriors, I’ve been a cyber professional most of my career, and I said newspaper earlier, so that tells you how old I am. I think that we are, as a cyber crew, we’re afraid to tell the mission owner that they will be compromised. This isn’t an if, it is a when you are compromised, what are you gonna do about it, right? We are not gonna be 100% successful at cyber defense, and so I talk a lot about this balance of protection versus resilience. When we put cyber capability in any system, we should be thinking about that balance. Protection being keeping the cost of compromise high to the adversary, make it really hard for them to get in, and resilience is making the cost of compromise low to the mission. When they do get in, not if, but when they do get in, they’re limited in their impact to mission.

So I think when we think about cyber clear for flight, for the commercial airliner that you flew here, or for a satellite that takes off, we need to be thinking very threat focused, right? Not vulnerability scans where we find 10,000 vulnerabilities, that’s not how the adversary is thinking about this. We need to be thinking about protection versus resilience, and that balance as it applies to the missions of that particular satellite. And I think that’s how we get a laser focus on getting clear for flight without being the classic cyber person who just represents a delay to cost schedule and performance in the name of putting my cool cyber widget on your mission platform.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

So I love the idea of going from a if to a when mindset, when this happens, instead of, hey, let’s plan for if this happens. Also like the fact that you pointed out, instead of just focus on vulnerabilities, right? Because those are gonna be there, like accept that as a given, let’s focus on the impact of those. And then that’s where we need to leverage our effort and resources and minimizing the impacts, identifying what those are, and then controlling what you can control in that regard. So thank you for those thoughts. That is a really good way to try to capture that.

We have a little bit more time for a couple of questions. I do wanna ask one as kind of an open question for the panel, something that’s kind of key to CASR when we’re working with commercial is, we really want to avoid, like I said, raising any additional barriers to entry for commercial to work with the government. One of the benefits of commercial is it’s fast, it’s innovative, there’s quick cycles, and you don’t wanna lose that magic because we’re asking you to jump through all the different hoops that, you know, your more traditionals might have because they’ve been working with the government for 50, 60 years. So there’s a balance there. It needs to be trusted enough, but you know, we have to make sure on the government side, we’re asking for exactly what we want and need without any additional barriers that we’re lifting.

So the question I have for you all that I kind of wanna open it up to the entire panel is, what does that sweet spot look like for your company, for your current role, whether it’s in policy or whether you’re developing product? What does that sweet spot look like and how can we improve upon that from the government perspective?

Dr. Jonathan Welch:

I can start with that. Something we talk about all the time ’cause there is a sweet spot and it’s complicated because it takes culture change to be able to do that. So, you know, the government, we build great products, we’ve, you know, hardened, militarized, ruggedized, all of that, and you have to ask today, is all of that really necessary? So the government tells us how to build something, right? You define requirements, you know, down multiple levels of what we have to build. And, you know, anybody that’s been in systems engineering long enough knows that I could follow all those requirements and still not get the desired outcome, right? So instead of defining what we’re looking for or what you’re, you know, by requirements, what’s the mission you want us to attack? Like, what thing do you really need it to do, right?

And that’s what you need to get out there. And we need to start, you know, with that and then also look at not building the perfect product, right, perfect products do not get things in the hands of the warfighter quickly, right? And, you know, you’re better to have something in the hands of the warfighter that we can evolve rather than having the perfect product that you have problems with that you can’t get delivered. Right, get the capabilities out there faster by removing the barriers of the detailed requirements and start thinking about the mission and tell us what mission you need us to perform and we can go build that product.

Kimberly Chamblin:

What he said, we’ve been habitualized into saying I needed zero-ized, I needed this, I needed that, and when you really challenge the client in that, you know, requirements-based discussion to say why and will that affect things, is it worth another six months and the cost associated with us getting you to that definition, I think resetting some of the terminology and talking about what is tolerable now, I love what you just said about protection versus resilience, I’m gonna probably steal that and use that in my next company meeting because I think that that is where we should be thinking about this and that’s where, you know, with our products, like we’re trying to keep them open, you can get our SDK and API without even being a customer, look at that stuff on the internet and we can work with you to bring what you need but we’re trying to kind of stay as a commercial company available for various types of users with various types of demands. So anyway, you were gonna-

Travis Steele:

Thanks, yeah, I was just gonna kind of lean in on the policy and doctrine fail at execution and we have an opportunity to change that, particularly in space, in my opinion. We can change the game with the commercial partnership with military in a way that if we lose legacy approach and thought patterns and think of it differently to that graceful degradation and resilience is the key and if we start from an architecture perspective with that in mind, then our TRDs and SRDs and the whole process of system engineering changes all the way to the left.

And that allows, ’cause there’s a lot of community of interest and competing vendors and all of that that want to work together, they want that common interest but because of those limitations and how things come out, which ways they come out, which programs bow, et cetera and there’s not alignment there all the times, they’re looking at how do I become differentiated in what I do and that can sometimes lead to different outcomes in execution. So I think there’s, we don’t need, for example, there’s some who believe that at the edge, even an orbital edge, we need the ability to do PSSCI. Really?

So if you’re a commercial provider that’s augmenting, do they need the full stack of that capability or do they need the decision quality information of the ability to handle a track and pass it on in resilience? So it’s a different, it’s a shift and it’s a mindset and those things also, by the way, allow us to move faster with those capabilities and not slow down the innovation, the commercial, and what we want them to bring.

Ryan Roberts:

Yeah, I mean, I think innovation is the key here. That often overly used quote from Henry Ford that said something like, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have set a faster horse.” They just, they didn’t even know what an internal combustion engine is. Their requirement was, “I wanna get from point A to point B as fast and as comfortably as possible.” So when you can turn industry loose with an outcome-based approach, get me from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and not say it has to be a four-legged animal, or it has to be this tall, or run this fast. Nope, just get me from point A to point B as fast as possible. I think you see a lot of incredible innovation, you know, like the Model T Ford, right?

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

I appreciate your all thoughts, and I heard a couple threads there. One, it’s the need for, and I think we’re getting there, the need for tighter linkages between industry, government, in particular, the operators, the operational community, warfighter community, the ones who are living the day-to-day, so that they can articulate, this is why we need it, this is how we plan to use it, and there’s a magic there when that exchange happens.

I will take this opportunity to give a shout-out to U.S. Space Command. There’s a team out there, they’ve done a lot of work in that regard by establishing their Apollo Insight series. They bring, you know, sometimes 50, 60 companies into an auditorium this size, they lock it down to TSSCI, they read some of them in just for the day, and they’re able to share with them in a more open forum, these are the challenges, these are the threats that we’re seeing, and what are your ideas? And they pass the microphone around, and there are some things that, you know, it’s a collegial environment, so they’re able to share very openly what they can and can’t do, you know, what they’re willing to do, where policy barriers might be, so that it gives us on the government side a much clearer picture of, you know, this is where we can focus on, this is what industry can provide, and we’re able to share in an open environment.

I think that was also to your point, Kim, is just being able to have those exchanges, you know, is really helpful, so you can help guide some of the discussion. Maybe you don’t need a horse. Maybe you need something that looks like this, right? And iterate from there. Thanks for letting me go off script there a little bit.

With that question, with that said, we have just enough time to do a couple hot takes from the panelists. We’re gonna go through one by one. I’d ask each of you to share two to three minutes of some top line messages, any thoughts that you had throughout the conversation to cap the discussion, and then we’ll start with Kim.

Kimberly Chamblin:

Sure, thank you. I would say, like, first of all, thanks to you for the invitation to join the panel. It seems to me like the imperative that Boston Dynamics has is to do a good job with our commercial product so we can make it available to the government for use. I fight that battle every day because there’s obviously a lot of applications for our products across the military and federal government space, and we’ve had quite a bit of success. We drive a lot of business for the company with our engagements with the military in particular. But one of the things we face is, you know, we get CMC compliance, or we have a demand for certain types of shipping labels, or, you know, the costs associated with, you know, submitting seed rolls, or getting, you know, our ATO certifications and things like that.

And so one thing that I’ve learned is, it’s okay to not be the prime. So I have said, to your point about the companies, I’m former Lockheed, so I feel, you know, both sides is, let them kind of bring us to the party. We can be the side dish at Thanksgiving. We don’t need to be the turkey. Although my colleagues might suggest I’m the turkey sometimes. But yeah, I think just like learning that it’s okay, what success looks like with a commercial product may not be what a traditional defense prime would measure success at. Be willing to kind of hand it over and say, bring us along to that solution space. I think that’s important and helpful.

I would also say just, we are looking for guidance as to what that C2, and I know here it’s far beyond that, but what that relationship should look like between us and other companies that are working across multi-domain operations. We’re not specialists in that. We’re really just trying to focus on Lego robotics problems and that in itself is costly. There’s high barriers to entry for this work and we’re not funded directly by the government. We don’t have these economies of scale that other technologies, we have some really tough things we’re trying to sort out. So having commercial success and getting after that will hopefully help the government, but we’ll also take all the help we can get with improving and allowing that to be sort of dual use technology that everyone gets a chance of. Thank you.

Dr. Jonathan Welch:

Awesome, thank you. Yeah, from a SAIC perspective, right now, talking about commercial products and building out commercial products to try to be faster, right? It takes a long time to build a militarized unit with all the requirements behind it. So how can you fill that gap quicker, right? We talked about distributed architectures, we talked about open MOSA designs and all of those things.

And when we build all of that in, then we have better interoperability, interconnectivity between that, and then we don’t get vendor locked, right? So that’s another big thing, staying away from that vendor lock with those open MOSA designs. So while we’re building at SCAC right now, we’re building a commercial relocatable radar. So to be able to handle some of these missions that are coming up, they’re built faster, they’re much quicker, it’s innovative, it’s quick to field and quick to replace, right? We can build two times the speed, three times the speed of what you’re traditionally used to in buying military products. And they fill the gaps, they do the job, they get things done. And we weren’t constrained, right? It’s our own investments that we’re making into these products to be able to fill these gaps, to fill these commercial needs that the government’s looking for, and the innovation that we’re looking for that’s gonna continue to move these markets forward.

So as we continue to look at architectures, making sure they’re open, making sure they’re distributed, and looking at new things that we’re fielding, we have to take into account the mission again, right? Back to the mission and how we take the account into the mission and how we protect the mission. Because again, we’re gonna get attacked, we’re gonna get hit, they’re gonna get through, and all that. And we need to be able to one, contain that, minimize the impact of that, and be reconfigurable within our architectures to allow us to continue to provide whatever service we need to that’s critical to our national defense.

So as you continue to think about taking the handcuffs off a little bit with the requirements and thinking about the mission as a whole, right, to the points I think that you’ve heard here several times, innovation is key and that allows us as not only contractors but commercial entities to be more innovative ’cause we’re not constraining ourselves to a certain thing. And I think that’s one of the key takeaways to be able to do that, and again, to be able to test that architecture and to be able to take things out, put things in, understand how long it takes to reconstitute what’s been taken away in the past that we have to do. And I don’t wanna leave out all of the ground systems that we have to support everything in space as well ’cause they’re just as vitally important to be able to do that same protection, the same mechanisms, the same architecture, and the same MOSA open interfaces to be able to have those interconnects between all of those systems to create a mission itself that the adversary doesn’t wanna attack anymore ’cause it’s gonna cost ’em way too much to do that.

So the higher price you raise of your adversaries to take out a mission, the more they’re gonna try to pivot and they’re gonna try to get you on another attack vector, which then we have to go figure out how to protect that.

Travis Steele:

I’ll extend my gratitude for the invite and thanks everyone for being here and staying. What I would say is there’s some scary information, right, when we talk about cyber and the adversary. Once, you know, with APTs, Advanced Persistent Threats, right, once an adversary finds the first exploit, about roughly seven minutes, every seven minutes, they can find the next opportunity. That’s about the time it takes to go through your favorite drive-through. Order at the menu, pick it up at the window. That’s what you’re dealing with. And when they’re inside, that’s what we have to be concerned about.

So the only way to operate in that contested environment, which, by the way, is what CORE is all about, is operating, right, in a contested environment, making sure the mission continues, I believe, is through a software-defined war-fighting capability. Those assets, when they’re in orbit, there will be a disconnected sequence of things that will happen. How it resolves that, continues to operate, and be resilient from that will be software-defined. So we have to build that in from the beginning. Also, the supply chain in the parts and the sensors and all that, equally important from the software supply chain. Knowing what’s in there, what’s in your code base, why it’s there, who put it there, was it cryptographically signed, does it have provenance of where it came from, you know, that builds your pipeline of trust all the way to the data and the functionality that that bird is providing.

So I think, you know, I’m just gonna double down on the software-defined aspect of that and make sure that, as we work together in industry, that that’s why MOSA and SOSA and those things are so important, but you still have to apply the software layer in a way that allows you to be composable and interoperate, especially as those commercial assets become online in augmenting the fight.

Ryan Roberts:

All right, I’m gonna end where Colonel Galindo started us, and I promise I’m gonna end with some hope. But first, you know, I don’t think it’s controversial to repeat what Colonel Galindo said, that the next global conflict will almost certainly begin in space, and it will likely begin with a cyber attack against space systems. And that space system may be commercial, it may be government, it may be both. So we all have a responsibility to make safe space in and through the cyber domain.

You know, the Air Force, at least the comm community, used to have a nice pithy saying, “No comm, no bomb.” I’m working on one for space, but right now is, you know, without the availability and resiliency of the cyber domain, there’s no space operations. Rolls right off the tongue. I’m working on it, I’m working on it. But the “no comm, no bomb” applies 100% to space. And here’s the hope. We have the greatest nation on the planet, we have the smartest people that care a lot, and I’ve got three daughters. I’m leaving here to get on a plane to go home and take my 16-year-old to the DMV, so I’m asking for prayer. And her modern way of life and mine depend on the services space and the men and women in uniform. We can make space more cyber-resilient, and we have to. Thank you.

Lt. Col. Brandon ‘Cherry’ Galindo:

I appreciate those final remarks. To take special note of going through the drive-thru, I’ll never look at it the same again, knowing that every seven minutes, you’re finding a vulnerability and you’re open to attack. And thank you for ending on a much more positive note, Ryan. I appreciate the thoughts there as well. Before we formally close out, Kim, Jonathan, Travis, Ryan, thank you for your time. You guys are great leaders in your companies in your respective fields. So thank you for sharing your expertise on the panel today. Thank you to the AFA team for helping arrange it and the invite. I’d also like to thank Ms. Helena Buckman just for all the work that it takes into logistics and pulling this together. I realize it’s an awful lot.

The central message is clear. Resilience cannot be achieved by protecting assets in isolation. Like those days are long gone. It requires distributed architecture, trusted data, information sharing, and the ability to reconstitute when necessary. I think that’s a really good spot to leave it on. You guys offered multiple thoughts and pathways that we need to explore, we’re going to explore to be successful in the next fight.

And we’ll put a pin in the discussion there. I want to thank the audience as well for taking the time out and having the patience to meet with us as well. So thank you all. And that’s everything that we have. Appreciate it.