Critical Orbit: The Case for Designating Space as National Infrastructure in the Cyber Age

Excerpt

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The United States has sixteen designated critical infrastructure sectors, including water, healthcare, finance, and the defense industrial base. These sectors provide “the essential services that underpin American society.” The Patriot Act of 2001 defines critical infrastructure as “Systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

Notably missing from the designated sectors of critical infrastructure is the space industry. Space is no longer just the backdrop for science fiction, used solely for entertainment purposes. Space provides data for positioning, navigation, and timing (“PNT”), as well as communication, remote sensing, and missile warning, among other applications. Functions of the space industry directly enable and contribute to all sixteen sectors of critical infrastructure. Without space, the essential services that underpin American society would be severely disrupted if not crippled.

Dr. Georgianna Shea is chief technologist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and its Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab and Humza Khan is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas.