Engineering Electronics That Survive Orbit

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Published June 10, 2026

Picture a particle smaller than an atom hurtling towards a seven-figure satellite. The encounter is profoundly lopsided. The particle punches through the spacecraft, sometimes disabling systems or destroying the satellite outright.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of what space does to electronics. A single iron nucleus flung across the galaxy by a supernova can destroy very expensive equipment in milliseconds. And in space, no one can hear you—or your satellite—scream.

This blog describes how a single subatomic event in space can end a mission, and explores how surviving orbit demands electronics engineered for exposure, unpredictability, and time.

Understanding the Rigors of Space

In most rugged environments on earth, electronics also degrade over time. Cold, heat, sand, and water all take their toll, which is why the ruggedized electronics industry creates a variety of products for markets such as military and scientific observation.

Space is its own category of rugged. However, this designation is not just due to temperature extremes or even the slow cumulative damage from radiation that builds up over months and years, gradually shifting transistor thresholds until circuits drift out of spec. Space is particularly punishing because of single high-energy particles—protons hurled out by the sun, iron nuclei from distant supernovas— that punch through spacecraft shielding and dump their charge onto transistors.  

These dangers are not limited to space. For example, in October 2025, a JetBlue Airbus A320 suddenly nosedived mid-flight over the Gulf of Mexico, injuring 15 passengers and forcing an emergency landing. The cause was a single bit that had flipped in the flight control computer, most likely struck by a cosmic ray. Airbus subsequently recalled around 6,000 aircraft for software updates.^[1]

Although similar instances of radiation damage are not common on Earth, these dangers occur much more frequently in space.

Radiation Damage

One example of a dangerous radiation effect is a single-event upset (SEU). This happens when a charged particle barrels through silicon, ionizing atoms along its path and leaving a wake of electron-hole pairs. If that wake dumps enough charge into a memory cell or flip-flop, the stored bit toggles. The 1 becomes a 0. The satellite thinks the thruster should fire. No permanent damage occurs, but data are compromised.

A single-event latch-up (SEL) is even more damaging. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits contain parasitic thyristor structures, accidental silicon-controlled rectifiers hiding in the substrate. A particle strike can trigger these into conduction, creating a low-impedance path from power to ground. When that happens, currents surge, and the silicon heats. Without fast intervention, the device is ruined.

Another danger is the total ionizing dose (TID). Charge accumulates in oxide layers over time, shifting thresholds and increasing leakage. A craft in low Earth orbit (LEO) might experience up to 1 kilorad of TID per year. A craft in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) many times more—up to 60krad annually. Over a 20-year mission, the higher end of this range would add up to a megarad of accumulated damage.^[2]

The cruel irony is that while shielding helps with TID, it can actually worsen SEU effects. As particles slow down in shielding material, their linear energy transfer increases, meaning they dump charge more densely into whatever they hit next.

Designing for Unpredictable Radiation

Engineers often design for extreme conditions by thinking in terms of mission duration. The level of required radiation hardening scales directly with how long the electronics need to survive. Satellites with different purposes and lifespans demonstrate varying levels of radiation resistance.

One example is CubeSats: standardized nanosatellites meant to last between one and five years.^[3] These are typically made with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts: mass-produced components that are not usually designed for space use.^[4] These components allow for quick production and reduced costs, but they also require significant testing and added radiation shielding to be used in space. Helpfully, if the satellite dies after a year, the data has probably already been transmitted home.

Commercial LEO satellites are meant to have a space life of five to seven years,^[5] and constellation satellites are designed to last about five years in space.^[6] These satellites need the substantial protection that radiation-tolerant (rad-tolerant) components offer.^[7] These parts aren’t originally intended for use in high-radiation conditions but are modified to be rad-tolerant. These modifications typically involve upscreening (i.e., testing commercial or automotive-grade parts beyond their rated specifications to find ones that happen to tolerate radiation better than average), careful shielding around sensitive components, and design margin (i.e., running circuits at less than maximum ratings so they still function as parameters drift).

Deep space probes and GEO satellites sometimes have to survive decades in space.^[8] At this level, radiation-hardened (rad-hard) parts need to be used.^[9] These components are designed for extreme space conditions. Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processes, error-correcting memory, redundant systems, and components all get tested for the space radiation environment. Every component has to withstand hundreds of kilorads.

Right now, rad-tolerant satellites are where the market is expanding. Thousands of constellation satellites are being launched for broadband, Earth observation, and defense networks. The companies building these constellations want rad-hard performance at something closer to commercial prices. That tension is currently driving most of the innovation.

Current Engineering Approaches

SOI technology has been a workhorse of rad-hard design for decades. Transistors are built in a thin silicon film on top of an insulating oxide layer. This technique eliminates the parasitic thyristor structures that enable latch-up and shrinks the charge collection volume by roughly an order of magnitude compared to bulk silicon. Less volume to collect charge means a particle has to deposit more energy to cause an upset.

Triple modular redundancy (TMR), meanwhile, takes a brute-force approach, where engineers build three copies of every critical circuit, which vote on the outputs. If one gets hit by a particle, the other two circuits outvote it. This works great, but it triples the silicon area, power consumption, and cost.

Recent academic work shows another approach. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, working with Sandia National Labs, recently demonstrated a rad-tolerant flip-flop fabricated in a 22nm fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) process that achieves TMR-equivalent protection in a smaller area.^[10]

Instead of building three separate flip-flops, the researchers reuse components within a single, more complex structure that provides the same fault tolerance at a fraction of the footprint—42 percent smaller than TMR, according to their testing.^[11] The team won the Best Paper Award at the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe conference in March 2025 and is deploying their design on a CubeSat in 2026.^[12]

Wide-bandgap semiconductors are also changing the equation for power electronics. Gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) have wider bandgaps than silicon, which means inherently higher radiation tolerance plus better efficiency at high voltages and temperatures. Recent space validation of rad-hard SiC power devices on the Chinese space station showed a fivefold improvement in power-to-volume ratio and efficiency, jumping from 85 percent to 95 percent compared to silicon.^[13] For power-hungry satellites, that translates directly into mass and thermal savings.

Effects on Earth

Radiation hardening used to mean bespoke chips, ceramic hermetic packaging, and six-figure price tags, but the industry is moving toward plastic packaging, commercial fabs, and academic research labs that can get their designs into orbit within a year of publication.

The same cosmic rays hitting satellites hit aircraft, data centers, and—at lower rates—smartphones. The JetBlue incident is a reminder that radiation effects are real and unforgiving. However, the techniques developed for orbit should filter down. As we depend more on electronics in safety-critical applications, the lessons learned from keeping satellites alive become increasingly relevant on the ground.

Conclusion

Space does not destroy electronics through one grand cinematic failure, but through countless microscopic, almost unseen ambushes. Therefore, designing hardware that survives orbit is not about brute strength alone, but about designing clever architecture, redundancy, and materials that treat every passing cosmic ray as just another nuisance rather than a mission-ending event.

[1]https://www.sidc.be/article/single-event-upset
[2]https://www.laser2cots.com/en/article/25.orbit.html
[3]https://www.nasa.gov/what-are-smallsats-and-cubesats/; https://kupsat.com/technical-foundations-and-lifecycle-of-cubesats-from-manufacturing-to-end-of-use/
[4]https://hubble.com/community/comparisons/why-radiation-hardening-matters-for-satellite-processors-and-what-it-costs/; https://www.laser2cots.com/en/article/5.COTS.html
[5]https://markwideresearch.com/commercial-leo-satellite-market
[6]https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
[7]https://www.doeeet.com/content/eee-components/radiation-hardened-and-radiation-tolerant-components/; https://hubble.com/community/comparisons/why-radiation-hardening-matters-for-satellite-processors-and-what-it-costs/
[8]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260504023835.htm
[9]https://www.doeeet.com/content/eee-components/radiation-hardened-and-radiation-tolerant-components/; https://hubble.com/community/comparisons/why-radiation-hardening-matters-for-satellite-processors-and-what-it-costs/
[10]https://www.ece.cmu.edu/news-and-events/story/2025/04/space-tolerant-computer-chips.html
[11]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10993214
[12]https://www.ece.cmu.edu/news-and-events/story/2025/04/space-tolerant-computer-chips.html
[13]https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_media/202501/t20250126_899365.shtml