  The development of safety-critical aerospace systems is traditionally
dominated by the C language. Its language characteristics make it trivial to
accidentally introduce memory safety issues resulting in undefined behavior or
security vulnerabilities. The Rust language aims to drastically reduce the
chance of introducing bugs and consequently produces overall more secure and
safer code. However, due to its relatively short lifespan, industry adaption in
safety-critical environments is still lacking. This work provides a set of
recommendations for the development of safety-critical space systems in Rust.
Our recommendations are based on insights from our multi-fold contributions
towards safer and more secure aerospace systems: We provide a comprehensive
overview of ongoing efforts to adapt Rust for safety-critical system
programming, highlighting its potential to enhance system robustness. Next, we
introduce a procedure for partially rewriting C-based systems in Rust, offering
a pragmatic pathway to improving safety without necessitating a full system
overhaul. During the execution of our rewriting case study, we identify and fix
three previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in a popular open-source
satellite communication protocol. Finally, we introduce a new Rust compiler
target configuration for bare metal PowerPC. With this, we aim to broaden
Rust's applicability in space-oriented projects, as the architecture is
commonly encountered in the domain, e.g., in the James Webb Space Telescope.
