These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond.

Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme:

Katherine Bennell-Pegg: 2026 Australian of the Year

Katherine Bennell-Pegg was named 2026 Australian of the Year on Sunday 26 January at the National Arboretum in Canberra. She’s 41, born in South Australia, holds dual British-Australian citizenship, and is the first person to qualify as an astronaut under the Australian flag. She hasn’t flown to space yet.

We’ve had the Space Agency since 2018, but no one actually representing the flag until now. And she’s not just a figurehead — she was already Director of Space Technology at the Agency before this, shaping policy and industry direction. Also a reservist Group Captain in the RAAF. Her background is space engineering, not test piloting like old-school astronauts.

When the European Space Agency opened applications in 2021, Bennell-Pegg applied using her British citizenship. 22,500 people applied. She was one of 25 who passed all stages — travelling to Europe multiple times during COVID to compete against candidates from 22 countries. She graduated from Basic Astronaut Training at the European Astronaut Centre in Germany in April 2024 as part of a class of six, the first international candidate to complete it. And then ESA offered to take her on as an astronaut representing Australia, not Britain.

From her acceptance speech:

“When I received my blue flight suit at the astronaut centre and right there, bright on the shoulder, was our flag, it was quite emotional. It marked something far bigger than myself. It said: That a door has been opened. That Australia now has a place at the forefront of human endeavour.”

“Astronauts are scientists in the sky and service of their nation, just a visible part of a much bigger team on the ground, a team that includes every sector and every occupation.”

Her thing is: space work is Earth work. Not escapism, and definitely not billionaire tourism. Satellites monitor our bushfires and floods, connect first responders in remote areas, guide tractors on farms. The Himawari satellites take images every 10 minutes and that data goes straight to our fire services (during the 2019-20 bushfires, satellite imagery showed smoke plumes roughly half the area of Europe, I remember those skies, it wasn’t good).

The government wants to triple the space industry to $12 billion and create 20,000 jobs by 2030. Having an actual astronaut out there making that case is new.

Australia’s other astronauts

Two Australians have been to space, but both had to become American to do it.

Paul Scully-Power (born Sydney, 1944) flew on Space Shuttle Challenger in October 1984 as a civilian oceanographer. US citizen from 1982. Also the first astronaut with a beard — NASA expected him to shave, but he showed it didn’t affect his helmet seal, so they let him keep it. He confirmed from orbit that spiral eddies exist in the ocean (you can see them with the naked eye from up there), which matters for climate modelling given two-thirds of Earth’s surface is water.

Andy Thomas (born Adelaide, 1951) became a US citizen in 1986 to join NASA. Four space flights between 1996-2005, 141 days on Mir, spacewalks on the ISS. His Andy Thomas Foundation now works on space education in Australia.

Bennell-Pegg is the first to officially represent Australia. Hopefully she’ll also get to go to space!

Challenger: 40 Years

We spent a fair bit of time on this one. Tuesday 28 January was the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. 73 seconds after liftoff, the shuttle broke apart at about 14.5 kilometres altitude. Seven people died: Commander Dick Scobee, Pilot Mike Smith, mission specialists Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and Judy Resnik, payload specialist Greg Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe — a high school social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. Two women, the first Asian American astronaut, the second Black astronaut, and a schoolteacher who’d won a nationwide competition to be the first teacher in space.

About 17% of Americans saw it live, including 2.5 million schoolchildren watching via special NASA feeds in classrooms. At Concord High, where McAuliffe taught, 1,200 students had assembled to watch their teacher go to space. Most adults were at work and saw replays. CNN broadcast live, but major networks had stopped covering shuttle launches by 1986. They’d become “routine.”

The vehicle didn’t actually explode in the fireball sense. The crew cabin stayed intact and continued to arc upward before falling. At least some crew were alive after the breakup — they activated emergency air supplies and tried to restart electrical power. The cabin hit the ocean at over 320 km/h nearly three minutes later. NASA says they probably lost consciousness when the cabin depressurised, but nobody really knows.

Ignored warnings

An O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster failed. Synthetic rubber, supposed to prevent hot gases escaping the booster joints. It was -3°C that morning — the coldest launch by far. The O-rings had only been tested to 3°C. The rubber stiffened and couldn’t seal.

The flaw was known since 1977. Engineers at contractor Morton Thiokol had observed unacceptable movement during stress tests and reported it. By 1980, NASA declared the design safe. O-ring erosion had been seen on previous flights, including warm-weather launches. Each time nothing catastrophic happened, so the problem got normalised. Sociologist Diane Vaughan later coined “normalisation of deviance” for this.

The night before launch, Thiokol engineer Bob Ebeling and four colleagues tried to convince NASA to delay. Thiokol recommended a delay. NASA pushed back — the launch had already been delayed five times. NASA’s Lawrence Mulloy: “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Thiokol executives overruled their own engineers.

The next morning, Ebeling was driving to work with his daughter Leslie (who also worked at Thiokol). He told her: “The Challenger’s going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die.” Beating his hands on the dashboard.

Another Thiokol engineer, Roger Boisjoly, had written a memo six months earlier warning of “a catastrophe of the highest order — loss of human life” if the problem wasn’t fixed. Three weeks after the explosion, he told NPR: “I fought like hell to stop that launch. I’m so torn up inside I can hardly talk about it, even now.”

Ebeling carried guilt for 30 years. In 2016, NPR interviewed him for the 30th anniversary. “I should have done more. I could have done more.” And: “God picked a loser.” Hundreds of people wrote to him after the story aired. Former Thiokol executives and NASA officials reached out to say it wasn’t his burden. NASA said the deaths reminded them “to remain vigilant and to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage to speak up.” Ebeling died in March 2016, shortly after. His daughter said the outpouring “really cleared his mind.”

Why it happened

1984-86 was the shuttle program’s golden age — fourteen successful missions in two years. NASA wanted 20 launches per year to make the program economically viable, and Challenger’s January 1986 mission was its 10th flight. Thiokol’s contract with NASA had a $10 million penalty for launch delays due to booster rockets. The contract was worth $800 million and up for renewal in 1986. So.

President Reagan appointed the Rogers Commission. Physicist Richard Feynman, a member, dropped a piece of O-ring rubber into a glass of ice water during a televised hearing and showed it had lost its resilience. The commission concluded it was “an accident rooted in history.”

NASA grounded flights for 32 months. Redesigned boosters didn’t fly until September 1988. Pressure suits came back for launch and re-entry (they’d been dropped after early shuttle flights — which is wild in hindsight). NASA created the Office of Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance. The organisational culture around safety was supposed to change too.

In total, 14 American astronauts died in shuttle disasters (7 Challenger, 7 Columbia), plus 3 in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 and 4 Soviet cosmonauts in the Soyuz program. Mission patches for Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia hang in every NASA control room. Artemis II, the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, is preparing for launch now.

Satellite Hacking

Space ISAC (Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center) reported a 118% surge in space-related cyber incidents in 2025 versus 2024. 117 publicly reported incidents from January to August 2025, and those are only the ones that get reported. In July 2025 they issued a “Level 3: High” threat alert for the entire space industry.

The global space economy is projected to grow from $630 billion to $1.8 trillion by 2035. There are about 11,700 active satellites up there right now. That’s a lot of targets.

Attacks that have actually happened

Viasat (February 2022): Russian state actors went after the American satellite provider’s ground network during the invasion of Ukraine. Knocked out internet for tens of thousands of satellite modems in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe. Cascading effects hit German wind energy infrastructure that depended on satellite comms.

Salt Typhoon (2025): Chinese state-sponsored group that initially breached US telecom providers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile). By mid-2025 the campaign extended to satellite communications. Viasat confirmed they were targeted but said customer data wasn’t breached.

Ukraine hitting back (confirmed 2025): The Ukrainian Cyber Alliance admitted they conducted a cyber attack against Russia’s Dozor-Teleport satellite system back in 2023. Hacktivist groups, state intelligence, orbital infrastructure — it’s all mixed up now.

Polish Space Agency (2025): POLSA confirmed a cyberattack forced them to take their entire network offline.

Why they’re vulnerable

You don’t have to hack the satellite itself. Ground control systems are often far more accessible, and that’s where most of these attacks happen.

A lot of satellites were designed decades ago without modern cybersecurity. They have 15-30 year lifespans. Encryption that was adequate at launch may be weak now, and you obviously can’t physically upgrade something in orbit. Newer satellites use commercial off-the-shelf components to cut costs (which just makes things worse). A study of commercial satellite modems found 16 vulnerabilities across nine devices, with basic protections like encryption disabled by default. Disabled by default!

Attackers can change orbits, intercept communications, alter sensor data, disable navigation. GPS spoofing and jamming have already disrupted thousands of European flights.

Erin Miller, executive director of Space ISAC: “Most space companies would have a difficult time defending against well-orchestrated cyberattacks by a nation-state.”

What’s being done about it

Space ISAC was established in 2019 with backing from NASA, US Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office to share cyber intelligence among members. NIST has a Cybersecurity Framework Profile for hybrid satellite networks. The EU’s NIS2 Directive now includes space as a critical sector. And Deloitte — Deloitte! — launched their Deloitte-1 satellite in March 2025 to test their “Silent Shield” cyber defence system in orbit. That’s where we are.

Next month I’ll be back on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania with Lucie for more space news.

View the archive of Space News.