Comment by astrange

1 day ago

Encryption is basically free as far as I know, but it is more complex and it must be hard to get software updates up there.

Here is their excuse:

> Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss. In addition, when using IPsec, ESP and IP headers can introduce 20–30 bytes of overhead, which is nontrivial for small-packet applications like VoIP and video calls

  • > Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss.

    Wow, I guess they're still betting on customers sending tons of redundant data up/down that they can shave off via compression? That's such a 90s modem thing to do. ("Faster than 56 kbit/s!!")

It is almost free on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration, yea

  • Space-faring electronics aren't exactly cost-sensitive - the cost of a cluster of crypto-accelerated CPUs or rad-hardened FPGAs is peanuts compared to the human and launch costs that go into these satellites.

    • Issue is the satellite was launched 10 years ago with 20-year-old tech. So, calculations of today may not be applicable on them.