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 telemetry, spectrum, command forensics—and your team on the controls of an asset facing increasing disruption.
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 Cyber Defender MRX focuses on:
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Recognizing navigation spoofing and jamming, link loss or intermittency, replay-like command behaviour, storage and sensor faults, and tampered telemetry in live operator data
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Classifying each incident as environment-wide, onboard failure, or adversary-driven—using evidence, not a single alarm
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Applying the right mitigations for the class of problem—link and key discipline, resets where appropriate, and cross-checks that restore trust in position and commands
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Coordinating across duty crews sharing one spacecraft while attacks may target one team’s RF identity or mission-critical collection windows
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Attributing hostile activity using multiple sensors—including imaging and RF awareness—and a clear timeline of what changed and when
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Summarizing outcomes in a short, defensible after-action review: what happened, what you did to resolve it, and why it worked.
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.
