Axiom Space is building the world's first commercial space station while serving as the principal provider of commercial human spaceflight services to the International Space Station. The company completed the first private mission to the ISS in 2022, and its team has been involved with every ISS mission since the program's inception. The threat model here is existential: space systems operate in an environment where network segmentation means physical isolation, where a compromised control system can't be patched by rolling a truck, and where the attack surface includes everything from ground station telemetry to onboard life support interfaces.
The technical stack runs deep into embedded territory - C, C++, and Rust for flight software, LabVIEW and NI cRIO for hardware integration, FPGA programming for real-time control, and industrial protocols like Modbus RTU/TCP and RS-485/RS-232 for sensor and actuator communication. These aren't enterprise SaaS concerns; this is safety-critical infrastructure where timing constraints are measured in milliseconds and failure modes include loss of mission or worse. Security engineering at this level means understanding how to harden real-time operating systems, validate cryptographic implementations in radiation environments, and design resilient command-and-control architectures that can survive both Byzantine faults and adversarial inputs.
Axiom's work spans low-Earth orbit operations, astronaut training, space medicine, and microgravity applications for governments, researchers, and manufacturers. The company is designing space infrastructure to make commercial LEO operations viable at scale - a domain where cybersecurity intersects with aerospace engineering, signal integrity, and operational resilience in ways that don't map cleanly to terrestrial playbooks. This is systems work in the literal sense: architecting trust boundaries across hybrid ground/space networks, protecting telemetry streams from spoofing or injection attacks, and ensuring that safety-critical code paths remain deterministic under all conditions.