Nothing up there is a sanctuary

Space stopped being a sanctuary the first time one satellite moved next to another on purpose

Everything since has been about the fact that we cannot tell why.

For sixty years the orbital environment was a place you put things and left them. Orbits were predictable, populations were small, and the only realistic threat was a ground-launched interceptor that everybody agreed nobody would use. Catalogue maintenance was a bookkeeping job. It is not a bookkeeping job any more.

Three things changed at once. The active population went from roughly a thousand satellites to more than ten thousand in fifteen years, so the sky is now crowded enough to hide in. Electric propulsion made routine, low-signature manoeuvre affordable, so objects no longer stay where the propagator says they will be. And several states demonstrated — publicly, repeatedly, and without violating any treaty — that a spacecraft can be flown up to somebody else's spacecraft and parked there.

The consequence is a specific and unpleasant intelligence problem. For the first ninety-five per cent of the trajectory, an inspection, a servicing mission, a rescue and an attack are the same manoeuvre. Nothing observable separates them. The United States has world-class detection and effectively no custody: we find things, and then we lose them, and then we find them again and cannot prove they are the same thing doing the same job. Without an unbroken record of an object behaving normally, the word "abnormal" has no meaning.

Underneath that sits a harder constraint. The kinetic answer is closed. The 2007 and 2021 destructive intercepts each put over a thousand catalogued fragments into orbits that we ourselves use, and the United States renounced destructive direct-ascent testing in 2022. So the response has to be non-kinetic, it has to be proportionate, and — because everything in this domain is invisible and deniable — it has to be provable. A defensive action nobody can verify is not a deterrent. It is a second ambiguity stacked on the first.

And the whole architecture rests on a positioning signal broadcast from 20,200 km at roughly one ten-thousandth of a trillionth of a watt. GPS jamming and spoofing across the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean is now a daily civil-aviation fact. Any plan that assumes GPS is a plan with a single point of failure that the adversary already knows how to press.

Four requirements fall out of that, and they are the four systems on this page.