[marsokod]

You'll need to have a good source on that because the majority of the latest satellites are using at least AES128 or better AES256 for this kind of stuff. Granted, a few of the implementations I have seen are a bit exotic and probably somewhat vulnerable, and the key management can be quite manual, but we are not at the middle school teenagers level anymore.

And I doubt very much that Starlink or OneWeb (OW is using AES256) satellites are that easy to hack, and they by themselves are most of the satellites.

Many satellites are also able to monitor contacts made from the ground and if someone is able to gain access to the communication stream, they'll quickly (within 10min) have to learn how to hack the onboard software to reset these monitors.

[EuropeOverlords]

starlink can monitor your traffic in ground station. so you do not need ground based listening station. optical links still does not work what i know. it is kind of dumb relay ( atleast today ) darpa had program which wanted starlink like satellites used for military purposes, with sensors AND machine learning onboard, 400 km is not very far from earth either, so you do not need complicated sensors (optics..) to see / hear / feel / receive things + capability of computation ( ML filtering, ML recognition.. ) can provide you with very powerful platform. . plus on top - with optical interconnects you can transmit data without touching "bad" side of globe XD

so with ESA putting this amount of (american made) computation, you can see where it is going.

im proponent of having telemetry not encrypted, we need this for same reason we use ADS/AIS

there are multiple "channels" from / to satellite. not all have to use consumer grade encryption.