The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook published by No Starch Press and written by Andrzej Olchawa and Milenko Starcik is ambitious, practical, and deeply rewarding. It takes you from knowing almost nothing about space missions to having intelligent conversations about their architecture and enough methodology to conduct your own security research. I came in with no real understanding of how spacecraft, ground stations, mission control systems, or satellite terminals worked. I finished the book with a working mental model of those systems and a clear sense of where I could keep learning on my own. That is a significant achievement in a 344-page book. The authors compress what feels like an entire introductory course into an information-dense technical survey without getting stuck in the mathematics of signals or orbital mechanics. The most useful lesson is how many boundaries exist across a space system, and how those boundaries interact. Ground stations, mission control software, flight software, communications protocols, user terminals, and navigation receivers each create opportunities for research. The only thing likely to slow some readers down is also one of the book's biggest strengths: it covers a broad range of concepts in a relatively small page count, which makes the reading technically dense. That compression is part of why it works. An 8.5/10 feels right for this fantastic introduction to space security. What keeps it from a perfect score is largely the same thing that makes it worth reading. So many concepts in 344 pages that the book stays technically dense and may put off readers looking for a lighter introduction. More than once I photographed a dense page and passed it to ChatGPT to explain every abbreviation before I could move on. Check at the full review on my website: jacobkrell.com/writeups/book…