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by bix6 332 days ago
Great write up about a somber topic.

Does anyone understand the security concerns here? The satellites can still be tracked and intercepted even with the feed unplugged so what does this really accomplish?

1 comments

I think the problem is on the dissemination side.

Navy receives data from the spacecraft, pushes that up into their probably-classified HPC environment, processes it there and then gets the output back into the unclassified world via a cross domain solution[1] of some sort.

High-to-low CDSes in particular are very expensive and complex to deploy and obtain approval to operate, so it makes sense that they’re reluctant to spend a ton of money and resources doing that as part of their modernisation work to support a spacecraft that they plan to decommission anyway.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-domain_solution