Space moved from positional to manoeuvring faster than security could be deployed.
Critical infrastructure lives on orbit: PNT, communications, missile warning and ISR underpin both the economy and the force.
The domain is contested: essential services now operate inside an environment defined by adversary manoeuvre.
Windows are short: threat and opportunity windows open and collapse in hours. Disruption does not wait for a briefing.
A domain defined by motion needs intelligence that moves with it.
Every asset in orbit is at rest, on the move, or under threat, and security means knowing which, continuously.
Propulsion is everywhere: electric propulsion and refuelling put manoeuvre capability across the catalogue, not just on flagships.
RPO is routine statecraft: rendezvous, proximity and shadowing operations are now persistent behaviour, not rare events.
Behaviour outruns tasking: pattern changes emerge and resolve faster than collection cycles can be re-tasked.
Tracking & observation: radar, optical and RF detection of objects on orbit. / Cataloguing: position and track maintenance across providers. / Raw feeds: multi-source data, varying quality and latency. / We consume this layer. We do not build it.
Fusion & custody: manoeuvre-resilient tracks fused from many partner sources. / Intent & prediction: reachability, behaviour and intent assessment with confidence. / Exposure scoring: a single cross-domain risk read per asset or portfolio. / On-orbit inference: distilled models run on the spacecraft itself. / Tracking is under 1% of the compute. Everything above it is ours.
Intent-based command: one operator sets intent; the system plans the manoeuvre. / Coordinated response: many vehicles act together against a threat. / Autonomous effect: attritable spacecraft execute the response on orbit. / Affordable at scale: cheap enough to field and to lose. / Intent-based command, within human-approved parameters.
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This is agentic, not autonomous: the system acts within intent a human has already approved, not on its own initiative. Ground-based tracking refreshes every few hours; a hostile-capable approach window can open in under 15 minutes. Closing that gap means moving from human timelines to machine timelines: detection to action in under 60 seconds.
Security is the assurance of continuity, not a single alert. We use three states to talk about space security: At Rest, In Transit and Under Threat. Think of a security team guarding a cash shipment: quiet monitoring while the vehicle is stationary, closer attention while it’s on the move and exposed, active response the moment a threat is confirmed.
| Capability | At Rest | In Transit | Under Threat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custody & Warning | Primary | Primary | Hands off to Active Defence & Response |
| Protected Operations | Posture | Primary | Primary |
| Active Defence & Response | — | Pre-positioning | Primary |
| Space Dependency Index | Yes | Yes | Yes: the score reflects the state |
The autonomy stack for space security provides four key outcomes:
Continuous track custody and threat warning across the domain.
Operate through contested conditions without loss of mission.
Coordinated on-orbit response inside human-approved intent.
A single cross-domain risk read per asset or portfolio.
The physics stopped being the hard part.
