An orbital habitat is a spacecraft or station built for people to live in space for extended periods, not just visit briefly. Unlike a short-duration mission module, it must support life support, power, thermal control, communications, navigation, and maintenance for weeks, months, or longer. From a cyber-security perspective, that makes it a safety-critical cyber-physical system: software, embedded controllers, and data links can directly affect human health.
Orbital habitats matter because attackers do not need to “break in” physically to cause harm. A compromised command channel, weakly protected remote maintenance interface, or tampered firmware update can disrupt environmental controls, deny access to telemetry, or disable redundancy. Defenders reduce risk with strong authentication, signed updates, network segmentation, monitoring, and manual fallback procedures. In practice, securing an orbital habitat means protecting not only computers, but the systems that keep the crew alive.