Nations are seeking stronger control over their own communications architectures. But how to define what sovereign space means, and what it can do within a more geopolitically complex space infrastructure, is still an evolving discussion.<\/p>\n
The answer to what defines \u201cspace sovereignty\u201d remains somewhat blurry. For example, the U.S. government is considered to have complete control over its space framework \u2014 except for the amount of semiconductors, and other hardware and software that is imported from nations like Taiwan.<\/p>\n
\u201cSovereignty for me is about how you control what you either procure or what you\u2019re operating,\u201d Benoit Deper, CEO and founder of Aerospacelab<\/strong>, said during a SATShow panel discussion on March 23.<\/p>\n Steve Mills, vice president, global government, Eutelsat Group<\/strong>, had a different interpretation. \u201cI believe that the word is slightly changing,\u201d he said. \u201cHere we are in a world of multi-orbit, multi frequency communications. The commercial world is launching satellites that are serving a great purpose for our defense and our critical national infrastructures. Yes, sovereignty still does mean national security. It still means these big, robust systems, and we\u2019re never going to get away from that. The word sovereign does mean different things to different people.\u201d<\/p>\n Mills recounted a conversation he had with one of the leaders in Ukraine about what sovereignty meant in their digital environment. \u201cHe was offshoring data because he didn\u2019t trust that leaving it in Ukraine was the best option for them,\u201d Mills said. \u201cSo they were offshoring their sovereign data capability.\u201d<\/p>\n John Reeves, vice president of Space and Mission systems for Viasat<\/strong>, agreed with Mills\u2019 assessment about the changing nature of the word. \u201cDifferent nations are going to have different interpretations in terms of what truly makes a capability sovereign,\u201d Reeves said. \u201cI think that the notion of sovereignty really comes back to, in large part, how the data is going to be managed, and how that\u2019s going to be assured.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to discussion about data on the network, denial of service is a huge consideration, Mills said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about securing the data on the network, choosing a public or a private network,\u201d he said. \u201cBut also about who has the ability to deny that service.\u201d<\/p>\n The changing landscape about what sovereignty means to different people is beginning to inform how manufacturers approach development, Deper said. \u201cFrom our perspective as a manufacturer, we are adapting to that new business model. We\u2019re more focused on sovereignty on the infrastructure side. People tend to be more flexible on sovereignty on the infrastructure side, and less flexible on sovereignty on the operations side.\u201d<\/p>\n Deper added that domestic content is becoming a large part of sovereignty strategies. He\u2019s seeing a trend in request for knowledge\/technology transfer to help equip a nation with in-country capabilities.<\/p>\n To accomplish domestic content demand, instead of doing the whole satellite at their factory, Aerospacelab would pre-assemble it and \u201chave kind of kit that we can then efficiently assemble in a certain country,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s definitely a trend that is growing.\u201d<\/p>\n Another trend is \u2018sovereignty by design,\u2019 which Reeves said takes into account several elements. \u201cYou\u2019re looking at the security of the data, the management of the data, the security of the infrastructure. And then you have to have people to operate these networks. You have to have some level of trust and assurance in terms of who the folks are that your government is likely to be contracting with to provide that type of support. That\u2019s all part of the mix as you look at delivering these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n As much in demand as these systems are for countries around the world, to build a reliable and resilient one is not possible for many of them. \u201cIt can be an eye-watering amount of money to get a global capable system up,\u201d Mills said. \u201cAnd then you have to refresh that system, and continue to refresh those satellites to exploit the advancements in technology.\u201d Europe is using the EU Commission to fund a system that is just under 11 billion euros, he said, and the EU Commission is funding over 60% of that total.<\/p>\n Deper said that scale of investment is what\u2019s needed for space architecture development has to progress. \u201cIn my opinion, sovereignty needs to come with higher commitments in terms of budgets,\u201d Deper said. \u201cOtherwise it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is another way to look at it, according to Reeves. \u201cI would hesitate to think about space as just being kind of a wealthy country economy game,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that it needs to be looked at truly as a global economy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of conversations like these around sovereignty, because there\u2019s uncertainty in the world. What are we focusing on? What are the customer problems to solve around sovereignty, around data assurance, around information assurance from an encryption perspective, making sure that those systems are built with those types of features?\u201d Reeves added. \u201cWe have to have a flexible nature to those capabilities built into the system so that a country can benefit from some of the performance attributes of the modern commercial satcom systems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nations are seeking stronger control over their own communications architectures. But how to define what sovereign space means, and what it can do within a more geopolitically complex space infrastructure, is still an evolving discussion. The answer to what defines \u201cspace sovereignty\u201d remains somewhat blurry. For example, the U.S. government is considered to have complete […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}