SpaceVPX is a backplane standard for demanding, high-reliability applications. Reliability is enhanced in SpaceVPX compared to VPX, by the provision for redundant payload, system controller and power supply modules. Critical signals are run in a point-to-point manner, “radially” out from the nominal and redundant system controller modules to the several payload modules. Communication functions are isolated from one another using several planes: data plane, control plane, management plane and utility plane. SpaceFibre is a high-availability, high-reliability, high-performance serial communication standard, which provides multiple virtual channels over each communication link. These virtual channels are isolated from one another and each has configurable quality of service (QoS). SpaceFibre provides multi-lane communication with graceful degradation in performance if a lane fails. Hot and cold redundancy can be provided within a multi-lane link with very fast (2 µs) detection and recovery from failures. The full paper introduces SpaceVPX and SpaceVPX-Lite and then outlines the key features of SpaceFibre. It then explains how a single communications plane can replace the data, control and management plane in SpaceVPX to advantage: reducing power consumption, reducing complexity, increasing availability and enhancing reliability.