I had the opportunity to speak with Chandra Donelson, the chief data and AI officer of the United States Space Force, and Arvind Srinivasan, the CTO of Maxar, the high-res satellite imagery company, yesterday at Brainstorm AI. Both have responsibility for systems that maintain U.S. national security from space.

Space Force—a branch of the U.S. armed forces established five years ago by then President Trump—protects, maintains, and develops space infrastructure with commercial partners. It is also charged with defending the U.S. against threats from hostile nation-state actors and terrorists. 

I started by asking what keeps them up at night.

For Donelson, it’s “knowing our adversaries understand our reliance on space” and are taking deliberate actions to hack, undermine and destroy space-based capabilities like GPS, secure communications and threat monitoring.

It’s not going to be a job for AI agents alone, Donelson says. “When it comes to high-stake things, there will always be a human in the loop.”

For Srinavasan? “Besides the rocks coming at our spacecraft at 27,000 miles per hour and the solar storms,” he said, a big worry is deep fakes. “There’s the immense capabilities that generative AI has and the ability for it to create concepts from very little information that are believable and real.”

One person who has spread deep fake propaganda generated by AI is, ironically, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX (whose rockets are now the leading space launch vehicles for the U.S. government) and Starlink (whose satellite communications network is used by the U.S. military).

Musk is both an opportunity and a threat for space entrepreneurs, but his companies are probably a net benefit to the ecosystem, Srinavasan says. “A decade ago, space was not accessible,” he says. Now, robust satellite infrastructure and low launch costs—much of it pioneered by Musk—have “created an ecosystem where space is democratized for the right players who know how to turn it into a profitable business.”

More news below. 

Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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