In this interactive workshop, attendees take the role of satellite operators responsible for maintaining service continuity aboard a legacy communications spacecraft in a contested RF and cyber environment, keeping critical links usable while multiple duty crews share the same bus under pressure.
The mission
Your spacecraft still carries traffic that cannot wait: command paths, navigation aids, and downlink performance must stay credible enough to keep operators in control. Telemetry and logs are useful, but not infallible. Your team knows legacy assumptions, predictable spectrum use, and trusted GNSS can be exploited; when commanders need continuity, every uplink, every downlink window, and every recovery decision counts.
The challenge
The Cyber Defender Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRX) unfolds through a timed sequence of operational and cyber-physical pressures.
Your hour begins with rising load and “normal” stress, until navigation and RF behavior stop matching habit. GPS spoofing and jamming seed doubt. Subsystem faults and suspicious injects force you to ask whether the bus, the ground segment, or an adversary is lying. And now a co-orbital rogue has been identified, adding more questions than answers. Did you miss a symptom? Can your crew attribute the disruption, separate global effects from targeted attack, and recover service with the right mitigations?
Teams must keep the mission operational as communications performance, command-path trust, subsystem health, and RF resilience are tested together.
Similar to a capture-the-flag challenge, participants score points by correctly identifying root causes, recognizing anomalous commands and injects, characterizing interference, and restoring communications performance before degradation spreads.
This is not a simplified table-top exercise with stylized components. This is a real operational challenge. No passive observers. No slides. Just teams, telemetry, spectrum, and command forensics, and a spacecraft that must stay under control while disruption stacks up.
Workshop delivery and training outcomes
Zendir simulations replicate systems-specific satellite operations in an immersive orbital environment. Our high-fidelity digital twin platform gives participants a live-virtual-constructive (LVC) to develop their skills through practical application.
Zendir's Orbital Intel MRX focuses on:
This is a free MRX workshop, but places are limited.
Interested in running a private MRX workshop for your team?
These events are designed for independent operators, but Zendir works with strategic organisations to deliver private MRX workshops. Get in touch with our team if you'd like to learn more.
