As space becomes a domain of warfare, democracies across the globe will increasingly rely on commercial satellite operators and private sector space companies to wage it, a senior NATO official told last week\u2019s CyberSat conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cEventually we want to see commercial partners embedded \u2014 real bodies, real company representatives \u2014 working and fighting side by side with our space operators,\u201d said Daniel Hilgert, the senior space coordinator within the Defence Industry, Innovation and Armaments Division (D2IA) at NATO<\/strong> headquarters.<\/p>\n In times of conflict, commercial space providers will find themselves on the front lines anyway, whether they liked it or not, so they might as well get ready now, Hilbert told the audience of space industry executives.<\/p>\n \u201cThis will be the reality for the crisis and the conflict anyway. So I think it should be normalized, this modus operandi, in peacetime,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n NATO is setting up a commercial integration cell at the alliance\u2019s new Space Operations Center (SOC) at Ramstein U.S. Air Force Base in southwestern Germany, to facilitate the integration of commercial operators into alliance space operations, Hilbert said, predicting it will be a powerful hub.<\/p>\n The SOC is NATO\u2019s \u201ccrown jewel for our space operations,\u201d he said, fusing space situational awareness data from multiple sources \u201cinto a common operating picture.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe all know that no single nation or single organization can see the entire space environment alone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Hilbert promised a new threat information sharing mechanism for unclassified data sharing with industry partners that sounded like it\u2019s modeled on the U.S. Space Systems Command Orbital Watch.<\/p>\n The German government has put its shoulder behind the effort to secure its national space capabilities, Florian G\u00f6hle, a technical officer with Berlin\u2019s Federal Office for Information Security<\/strong> (BSI), told a different session.<\/p>\n German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius recently announced an unprecedented $41 billion for space security over the next five years, warning: \u201cOur Achilles\u2019 heel lies in space.\u201d He revealed how Russian satellites had stalked two Intelsat satellites used by the German military.<\/p>\n Global resources like GPS and Galileo are being jammed and there are non-kinetic attacks against Earth Observation satellites, G\u00f6hle said, \u201cWe need secure systems. \u2026 We will invest a lot of money in military space projects.\u201d<\/p>\n The spending aims to secure space infrastructure for broader international and scientific use, he added, \u201cSpace security needs to be international, in our opinion, because in space you don\u2019t have borders.\u201d<\/p>\n The era of space as a domain of conflict is upon us today, Hilbert emphasized. Russia\u2019s increasingly brazen hybrid warfare efforts already extended into space: \u201cEvery day satellites are being jammed. \u2026 So it\u2019s not just the drones, it\u2019s not just the jets that are violating our airspace, but we also have them in space on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n Democracies have to leverage innovation to prepare for and deter conflict with autocracies, Hilbert said. \u201cOur alliance is home to the world\u2019s leading defense industrial suppliers. We have an industrial base that continues to innovate, that continues to push technological boundaries, we have to use those leaps for the greater good, for peace, for prosperity and democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n But the cutting edge of space innovation might turn out to be a double-edged blade, according to Michael Bernat, cyber CTO of Israeli defense tech outfit Rafael Advanced Defense Systems<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The development of inter-satellite communications should take security lessons from the experience of drone warfare, where sophisticated countermeasures were required to prevent imposters and spoofing. \u201cEverything that we are seeing in the drone area will be in the space area,\u201d Bernat said.<\/p>\n The supply chain has been so compromised, he added, that Rafael had invested heavily in building its own bespoke alternatives to open source or commercially developed hardware and software.<\/p>\n \u201cBy getting known components from out of the shelf, we are compromising the entire system,\u201d Bernat said. \u201cAnd so we started to engineer, and we are investing tons of money in order to have our own components that are not publicly used, in order to minimize the attack surface of our user.\u201d<\/p>\n Many NATO member states are reliant on a single commercial provider, particularly for space-based imagery, Hilbert commented.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great that [NATO member] nations go out and contract more commercial services, but I think the focus on [on everybody using the same] individual single providers can really create some vulnerabilities and risks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One space executive not authorized to speak to the media noted that setting up a commercial integration cell, like the one at the U.S. Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) at Vandenberg, California, is part of a pattern on the part of NATO: \u201cThey are following the lead of the U.S. Space Force.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, Hilbert reported on progress with NATO\u2019s Front Door, a concept explicitly borrowed from the U.S. Space Force \u2014 a single point of contact for potential contractors. NATO\u2019s Front Door will offer \u201ca unique platform that should make it easier for industry to connect to us, to the range of different NATO players in the NATO environment, but also with all the individual allies that have their own Front Doors,\u201d Hilbert said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will establish a new marketplace for space services to allow NATO and then eventually allies, to more rapidly procure commercial services,\u201d he said. And the process would not just be a one-way procurement funnel.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Front Door will not just be a door for you to come into our organization, but we also want this to be a radar for us, for NATO, for the [member] nations, to basically help us understand what technologies are you developing, [and] understand where should we invest. We also want to use this to share threat [data]. So there\u2019s a range of different things that we want to do with this Front Door.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to build a more coherent and effective relationship with the commercial space sector,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Front Door is proceeding at the speed of government, Hilbert said: \u201cIn every big bureaucracy you have a lot of different actors, and it\u2019s sometimes challenging to push.\u201d He promised the organization would launch in the first half of 2026.<\/p>\n For NATO, he said, Front Door will start with space, but it is a procurement approach the alliance plans to promote for all its military procurement. \u201cWe really want to use space as a laboratory to test how this works, \u2026 because we see similar challenges for non-traditional defense products in the cyber, the land and air and maritime domains,\u201d said Hilbert.<\/p>\n The fundamental challenge in every domain is the length of the procurement cycle. \u201cIn the space sector, the pace of technology development is so rapid that we really don\u2019t have the luxury of time to use those procurement and acquisition models from the Cold War times,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Although NATO member states have committed to a new baseline of 3.5% of GDP for core defense requirements, there is more to it than just throwing money at the problem. \u201cInvesting is one issue. You can open the cash boxes. But ensuring that our industries can absorb the influx of cash and deliver, that\u2019s a completely different issue,\u201d Hilbert said.<\/p>\n To help accelerate delivery timelines, NATO has worked with the French space agency CNES to establish a center of excellence in Toulouse.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to see nations to harness the innovation that comes from the commercial but at the same time, I think we still need to adapt our mindsets, our processes and structures to this new reality,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As space becomes a domain of warfare, democracies across the globe will increasingly rely on commercial satellite operators and private sector space companies to wage it, a senior NATO official told last week\u2019s CyberSat conference. \u201cEventually we want to see commercial partners embedded \u2014 real bodies, real company representatives \u2014 working and fighting side by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47967,"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-47966","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\/47966"}],"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=47966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}