Fun as long as it lasted, Falcon 9 telemetry is now encrypted

A few weeks ago, we announced that Reddit users [derekcz] and [Xerbot] had managed to receive the 2232.5 MHz telemetry downlink from an upper stage of the Falcon 9 and extract some interesting plaintext strings. Along with further software manipulations, the vehicle’s video streams were decoded resulting in absolutely stunning shots of the rocket and its payload from low earth orbit.

Sadly, it seems those heady days are now over, because [derekcz] reports that the downlink of the last Falcon 9 mission was nothing but intelligible noise. Since the hardware and software haven’t changed on its end, the only logical conclusion is that SpaceX wasn’t too happy that the radio amateurs were listening to their rocket and decided to use some form of encryption.

Considering that this data apparently went unencrypted for almost a decade before anyone on the ground noticed, it’s easy to see this as an overreaction. After all, what’s the harm with a few geeks with hacked antennas together to peek at a stack of Starlink satellites? [derekcz] even thought that allowing amateurs to capture these views from space might gain a positive buzz in society, something Elon Musk never seems to get enough of.

On the other hand, we know SpaceX is actively pursuing more lucrative national security launch contracts for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. For these sensitive government payloads, normal on-screen telemetry data and spatial views are omitted from the company’s official live streams. It seems likely that the Pentagon would be very interested in how civilians got this information, and a guarantee from SpaceX that the link would be encrypted for all future flights could have helped smooth things out.

At the end of the message [derekcz] echoes a sentiment we’ve heard recently from other ham radio operators that soon space may be closed to us civilians. As older weather satellites start to fail and are replaced by newer and inevitably more complex models, the days of capturing satellite imagery with an RTL-SDR and a few lines of Python are likely numbered.