Amazon is launching two satellites into orbit this week as part of its space-based internet mission known as Project Kuiper. The aim is to beam internet to nearly anywhere in the world using thousands of satellites orbiting Earth.
Gregory Falco, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, studies space supremacy and cybersecurity. He is the director of the Aerospace ADVERSARY Laboratory, which designs and develops next-generation autonomous, secure and resilient space infrastructure.
Falco says:
“We’ll immediately be paying attention to what end users of Kuiper can do to reverse engineer their user segment and figure out how it works and how it compares to Starlink and OneWeb. One of the most exciting parts about Starlink is that the user terminals yielded a bunch of insight into how Starlink communicated back to end users. We are eager to see if Amazon did any secure-by-design architecting or if they employed old techniques riddled with security vulnerabilities.
“I’m also curious if Amazon plans dual-use capabilities where government/defense will be a major client. This may result in the targeting of Kuiper like that of Starlink in Ukraine. This is Amazon’s first proliferated LEO constellation, so we expect to see some failures. We also expect there to be complaints from the astronomy community about their impact on the night sky. Their numbers will pale in comparison to Starlink at first, but the constellation will grow quickly.
“Given the FCC’s first enforcement of fines for space debris, I am confident we will hear about how Amazon plans to decommission failed satellites.”
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