Radiation-Effects Testing and the New Space Economy
As launch costs fall and satellites multiply, the ability to prove electronics can survive space radiation has become critical infrastructure.
5 min read
The number of satellites in orbit has grown dramatically in recent years, driven by lower launch costs, commercial constellations and renewed government investment. Every one of those spacecraft depends on electronics, and every piece of electronics in space faces the same hazard: radiation.
Why radiation matters
Outside the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, energetic protons and heavier particles pass through spacecraft continuously. Their effects fall into two broad categories. Cumulative damage builds up over a mission and gradually degrades components. Single-event effects happen in an instant, when one particle strikes a sensitive part of a chip — flipping a stored bit, corrupting a calculation or, in the worst case, permanently damaging the device.
For decades, space programs relied heavily on specialised radiation-hardened parts. Today many missions use commercial components to reduce cost and gain performance. That shift makes testing more important, not less: engineers need evidence of how each part actually behaves under radiation before it flies.
How testing works
Ground-based testing uses particle accelerators to expose components to controlled beams that represent the space environment. Proton beams are especially valuable because protons dominate the radiation environment in many orbits, including the belts surrounding Earth. Engineers measure how often errors occur at different energies and doses, then use that data to design shielding, error correction and redundancy.
The practical constraint has long been access. A limited number of facilities offer high-energy proton beams, and many are shared with medical treatment or academic research, which makes scheduling difficult for commercial programs working to tight timelines.
Building capacity
That bottleneck is why dedicated commercial capability matters. Aerospace Research Center in Winter Garden, Florida, operates an NRC-licensed 230 MeV proton cyclotron for space, defense and research customers. Facilities like it allow engineering teams to test on their own schedules, iterate faster and qualify components with confidence.
The broader point
The new space economy is often described in terms of rockets and satellites. Less visible, but just as essential, is the infrastructure that makes those systems reliable. Specialised testing capacity is part of that foundation — technically demanding, scarce, and increasingly central to how quickly the industry can grow.