Securing the orbital economy: Collective Defence is all of our responsibility

The UK’s critical national infrastructure, our public sector services and the British industries that support and/or utilise them, are dependent on space-enabled services to sustain the way we communicate, trade, travel, and protect and defend this nation.  These services shape how we live, work and play. Yet securing individual spacecraft, or constellations, their terrestrial support systems and the organisations that deliver these critical space services is no longer a credible approach.

The UK’s national security and economic prosperity is dependent on our collective ability to address the numerous threats and hazards to our space operations and our capacity to quickly adapt and reconstitute our space systems to re-establish the space services our society depends upon: AKA our resilience.

This national resilience challenge requires a shift in how every stakeholder involved within the UK space sector thinks about their operations and business risk. A behavioural shift away from protecting individual capabilities to understanding shared dependencies and potential vulnerabilities across the UK Space ecosystem is required.  The exchange of operational threat intelligence eg, indicators of compromise, to raise collective awareness and understanding is key to the execution of a coherent national response.

Space resilience discussions during this year’s Farnborough International Air Show with space sector stakeholders from across government, industry and academia, facilitated by CGI’s Secure Space Systems team and led by the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (Space ISAC) UK Hub reinforced the urgency of this shift.

Five business priorities emerged from this ongoing discussion.

1. Security needs to reflect how interconnected space has become

Space infrastructure does not operate in isolation. Spacecraft depend on significant ground infrastructure, communications networks, management systems, technology stacks, designers, testers, suppliers and users. Combined they deliver significant value to the UK: but they also create significant dependencies and vulnerabilities that adversaries can and are exploiting.

A vulnerability within one part of the supply-chain can therefore have consequences well beyond its business and operational boundaries. This reality challenges traditional assumptions about ‘dual use’ technology. Organisations may perceive and therefore self-declare a capability as intended for civilian or military purposes, but in the midst of current hybrid warfare activities, our adversaries have already declared that distinction irrelevant.  

Space systems’ security design, implementation and continuous validation need to reflect this reality. Protecting individual assets remains essential, but space ecosystem resilience, the ability to mitigate and the capacity to recover, depends on understanding the connections and dependencies between them.

2. Shared intelligence needs to become operational

No operator, supplier or government organisation has a complete picture of the threats facing the UK’s space architecture. Closing this awareness gap requires the trusted sharing of decision quality space threat and hazard intelligence to help organisations identify vulnerabilities and compromise earlier and react accordingly.

This is where a Space ISAC Watch Centre, operating in the UK and interfacing with Space ISAC’s other global hubs, has significant potential to close the gap. Its primary value proposition would be the live operational Cyber Electro Magnetic Activities (CEMA) threat intelligence service. This helps members and partners turn fragmented pieces of information into a shared and timely understanding of space hazards and threats and their associated indicators of compromise.

Machine Learning algorithms and associated agents, including closed/open-weight, and open-source frontier AI models make this sense-understand-decide-act challenge even more pressing. The time between system vulnerability detection and exploitation has collapsed as adversaries operate at machine speed with guarded and unguarded models fighting for control.

3. Resilience has to include the whole supply chain

The UK space sector is dominated by a diverse network of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), many of which hold valuable operational knowledge and threat intelligence.

Their participation in this national initiative cannot be an afterthought.

CEMA threat and hazard intelligence services need to recognise the business and operational realities smaller organisations face. The cyber poverty gap between a Space SME and a Space prime can be considerable. The burden to share, inform, educate, and collectively raise awareness to improve the UK’s ability to protect and defend its space economy requires a whole space ecosystem team approach. Participation must be straightforward, proportionate and reciprocal. Organisations need to understand what information is useful, how to share it securely and what they will receive in return.

The same principle applies to standards. Having strong security standards is important, but their real value comes from consistent adoption across operators, government programmes, suppliers and new entrants.

Space security, resilience and economic growth should reinforce one another. A space sector that can demonstrate operational and business resilience and trusted ways of working strengthens its value proposition with clients, partners, investors and international markets.

4. We should connect capability, not duplicate it

The UK Does not need another isolated, classification restricted source of CEMA threat and hazard information: it does need a live, accessible, operational space ecosystem cohering function.

Any future Space ISAC UK Watch Centre should connect with existing national and international operational capabilities, such as the National Space Operations Centre (NSpOC), the Joint Commercial Operations (JCO) initiative, NCSC’s Space Security Information Exchange (SSIE) and of course the four other and extant Space ISAC national hubs that already make up the Global Space ISAC.

The watch centre objective should be practical: get decision quality and timely CEMA threat and hazard intelligence to the organisations that need it so they can act on it.

That raises challenging but addressable issues around trust, classification, interoperability and the respective responsibilities of government and industry and academia. As a live operational construct, Space ISAC’s watch centre in Colorado Springs has already addressed many of these issues.

5. Resilience needs to be exercised, not assumed

Sharing CEMA threat and hazard intelligence improves awareness. It does not tell us how effectively organisations will respond together under pressure.

That is why continuous exercising should become a core part of collective space security culture.

A cyber-attack Foor EM interference event affecting a satellite could very quickly escalate into a significant service availability impact for the UK’s financial services, transport, logistics, telecommunications, energy, agriculture, utilities and defence sectors. Exercises need to reflect those connections rather than test individual organisations or technical functions in isolation.

Space ecosystem security exercises reveal dependencies that are difficult to see on paper. Exercises test stakeholder assumptions, perspectives, decision-making and communication processes, they clarify responsibilities and response protocols and crucially help to build trusted relationships before an incident occurs.

The question is not whether each organisation has a response plan. It is: when was that plan last tested and will it still work when organisations and the ecosystems they share need to respond together?

From collaboration to collective defence

The discussions at Farnborough pointed to a wider conclusion for the space sector.

Collaboration is necessary but it is not the outcome. It needs to translate into operational capability: better intelligence, broader participation, connected security capabilities and continuous exercising that stress-tests how all stakeholders in the space, and contiguous ecosystems need to respond under pressure.

CGI’s membership of and work with Space ISAC reflects this approach, bringing together cybersecurity expertise, operational space missions’ execution and broad partnerships across the space community.

As our society’s reliance on space grows, the definition of effective space security and mission resilience must grow too. Protecting individual systems remains essential. But lasting space ecosystem resilience will depend on our ability to understand shared risks, recognise threats and hazards earlier and respond collectively at pace when our space systems and services are challenged. Those of us with insight into the challenges have both the opportunity and the responsibility to act now, helping safeguard the way of life we value.

Our adversary’s hybrid warfighting capability is accelerating. The UK’s ability to understand and mitigate this capability and our capacity to recover rapidly from attack will be critical. A Space ISAC Watch Centre in the UK would enhance our national resilience by connecting organisations and providing them with operational insights to protect and defend their space systems and supply chain. Farnborough advanced that conversation. The priority now is action.

Find out more on how we work with government, industry, and partners to strengthen the security and resilience of space systems.