Things Vito Askins Has Said on Podcasts

“We often treat readiness as an additive process where as long as you have A, B, C, and D ready, inherently by default, program is ready. But integration readiness really isn't the sum of its subsystems readiness. It's the confidence that the relationships between those subsystems will still produce the intended mission outcome.” — Vito Askins, CyberWire Daily

The host asked where mission integration tends to fall apart. Askins, who has written a book on integration risk in space programs, says programs wrongly call themselves ready by adding up subsystem status.

CyberWire Daily · 2026-11-08 Permalink → Listen →

CyberWire Daily Around 13:58 into the episode

Speaker 3

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Maria Varmazis

…own certain things, things get political in terms of who's on what turf. When the rubber meets the road, it can get very complicated about who owns what responsibility. Is that where things tend to fall apart? Is that where the friction tends to lie? What have you seen and what can be improved?

Vito Askins

It would be very hard to line up really a cut and dry point of where things fall apart. But I think the biggest indicators that you'll see or that I've seen in this is programs tend to get a lot of things wrong about mission readiness so that they can label a mission ready. We often treat readiness as an additive process where as long as you have A, B, C, and D ready, inherently by default, program is ready. But integration readiness really isn't the sum of its subsystems readiness. It's the confidence that the relationships between those subsystems will still produce the intended mission outcome. And I think a lot of problems with integration readiness is that systems engineers and technical leaderships don't ask the questions or enough questions. Rather, they make too many assumptions. And making assumptions is fine. That's how you develop a program and you stay your end goal and your customer readiness. But if you look at a program and assume it's going to do X, Y, and Z and you don't…

Maria Varmazis

Yeah. So how yeah, so how do we challenge those assumptions? I actually really like your point that it's also a management thing. I mean, on a very human level, nobody wants to be the person that goes, hey, we're almost at what seems to be the finish line. Let's slow down. You know, nobody wants to…

Vito Askins

Yeah, we challenge those assumptions and we remove that technical debt by creating a system that has such high fidelity between the advancement points of the development that there isn't, there's not allowable gaps that can just kind of pop up out of nowhere. You know, if you're working on your car…

Maria Varmazis

Certainly. Yeah. And I would imagine to your excellent point about these missions are often not on orbit for nearly as long, but they're also becoming incredibly complex. The requirements are just ballooning. And certainly the plans that we're hearing for some of these multi-orbit constellations…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

“An adversary does not care how we've divided organizational responsibility. And they don't stop at the edge of a contract or subsystem or boundary. They look for a path through the entire system. … They don't care that B and C subsystems are ready. They care that they can get from A to Z without you noticing or stopping them.” — Vito Askins, CyberWire Daily

Asked for a cybersecurity example of risk that only shows up when space systems are integrated, Vito Askins frames it as asking what one compromised credential or ground interface enables across the whole mission.

CyberWire Daily · 2026-11-08 Permalink → Listen →

CyberWire Daily Around 07:19 into the episode

Vito Askins

…as you can be. And still, there can be problems that come on later just because of the way the industry works. It's a massive, complex industry, and there's a lot of moving parts. And sometimes all those parts can move and just not necessarily move towards the right direction until you force it to.

Maria Varmazis

…parallels there that we can think about. There's a certain problem that just only appears once we bake things up to a certain level. And I'm sure you've seen things like that many, many times. And I'm wondering if you can walk me through maybe an example or some sort of paradigm that we can follow.

Vito Askins

Sure. Now, I naturally will approach cybersecurity primarily from the system engineering and mission readiness state. I'm not trying to replace the cyber specialist. What my question would be on this is how does cyber risk interact with the rest of the mission architecture? And cyber makes the problem especially visible because an adversary does not care how we've divided organizational responsibility. And they don't stop at the edge of a contract or subsystem or boundary. They look for a path through the entire system. And I think system engineering really has to do kind of the same thing. And I'll give an example of that. So if you would imagine a satellite mission where the spacecraft and the ground software, the network providers, the identity management systems and all the operation environments, they all satisfy their allocated requirements. Individually, each organization may have good evidence, but now…

Maria Varmazis

We'll take a quick break now. Be right back.

Speaker 3

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Maria Varmazis

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Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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