In the days after the International Space Summit in Paris, which split its programme between a civilian track at the Grand Palais and a military one at the Invalides, Carolin Busch made the case that the split matters less than the summit's own architecture implies. As Senior Manager for Defence & Space at Sopra Steria in Germany, she argues the harder problem isn't where to draw the line between civilian and military space, but how to make everything on both sides of it resilient.
Last winter, at a conference hosted by the European Union, Carolin watched a demonstration of a very practical idea: a robotic satellite able to repair other satellites in orbit or refuel them. The system had been designed with a civilian purpose in mind: a growing space economy, with increasingly valuable satellites worth servicing rather than replacing. A colonel, attending the conference, was asked whether the military could use it too. "Yeah, of course," he said. But, he added, this would be a prime target for Europe’s adversaries.
Dual-use is not merely a question of a technology's applicability, but of the security architecture, accountability, and resilience that surround it. Most technologies in space can be used for either civilian or military purposes, but the latter will be designed very differently from the beginning.
The end of the bent pipe
For most of its history, Carolin explains, the space industry worked on what engineers call the bent pipe principle: a satellite, usually geostationary, receives a signal from the ground and sends it back down, perhaps amplified, but essentially unchanged. It was a relay, not a system: static, and built for observation or communication rather than action.
That is changing as the industry moves from a handful of large geostationary satellites towards networks of many smaller ones in low Earth orbit, linked by optical inter-satellite connections that move data at the speed of light. Processing is starting to happen on board rather than on the ground: edge computing, in industry terms. More and more operators are moving intelligence from the ground up into space.
Everything up there is dual-use
The robotic satellite is a useful illustration, Carolin says, because it shows exactly where dual-use complicates things. Once a system is designed for military use, the requirements around it change – security above all – and those requirements drive the design, and the cost, upward.
The reverse matters just as much, in her view. As the space economy grows and satellites become higher-value assets, purely civilian systems need the same instinct. "If you look at Ukraine, civilian infrastructure is being targeted heavily," she says. Two Russian satellites have already drawn the attention of European security services for manoeuvring unusually close to European satellites. As a result, commercial operators are increasingly exploring non-destructive measures to protect high-value space assets.
Everyone wants their own threat list
But the challenge extends beyond protecting individual satellites. As orbital infrastructures become even more essential to communications, navigation, observation and security than they already are and if current geopolitical tensions increase, the real question is no longer whether threats exist, but how nations and operators respond to them collectively.
Collective-defence mechanisms already exist for the physical world, on the model of NATO's Article 5; space, Carolin argues, needs the same discussion about thresholds, at what point an incident in orbit counts as an attack. IRIS², Europe's secure satellite constellation, is in the middle of procurement now, which makes the question practical rather than theoretical.
The obstacle to true cooperation, in Carolin’s experience, is rarely the technology. It's data. Countries are reluctant to share, for instance, threat intelligence, each wanting to keep such data sovereign. Techniques such as federated machine learning (training models on data that never leaves national systems) offer a technical way round the problem. The politics around it, though, hasn't caught up.
Where Sopra Steria fits into this new space sector, Carolin says, is in helping build that technological sovereignty directly, including, through the group's German entity, supporting security organisations navigate the growing complexity of sovereign digital capabilities. The company's role lies in integrating secure infrastructures, trusted technologies and emerging innovation into solutions that can be operated reliably at scale.