NATO military leaders and others attending a summit in Paris said their approach to space defense has shifted from strategy to tactics as prospects increase for warfighting in the domain, according to news accounts from the September 2025 Space Defense and Security Summit. Maj. Gen. Vincent Chusseau, commander of French Space Command, told the second annual summit in Paris that “things are accelerating very fast,” according to Defense News. “Space is a really full operational domain. We talk about warfighting in space.” He provided no details, but Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, commander of 3 Canadian Space Division, said more than…
Apogee
Links among Indian Navy ships, planes and command centers across the Indian Ocean will get a boost from a satellite orbited in November 2025 — the largest communications spacecraft ever launched from the nation’s soil. The Indian Space Research Organisation, the nation’s space agency, sent up GSAT-7R to replace the aging GSAT-7, launched in 2013 and previously the backbone of India’s naval communications, the Times of India newspaper reported. GSAT-7R, also known as CMS-03, is designed to expand secure communications for the Navy’s blue-water operations across UHF, S, C and Ku bands, helping transmit voice, video and data among warships,…
The United Kingdom’s military is taking steps to protect the nation’s space assets against interference by adversaries such as Russia. The U.K. and United States space commands conducted their first joint military operation in space in September 2025, moving two satellites close together during a rendezvous and proximity operation in geostationary orbit. For about a week, a U.S. satellite checked whether SKYNET 5A, a U.K. military communications satellite, was operating as intended, according to a report from the Royal Air Force. The operation was conducted under Multinational Force-Operation Olympic Defender, a U.S.-led space coalition that also includes Australia, Canada, France,…
The head of a fast-growing tech firm has noticed that the promise of rapid advancements in space defense is bringing around some top public decision-makers to deep truths about the free market system. “I believe that the Department of War and the U.S. government — governments across the world, actually — are finally understanding that there’s more private capital out there than there is taxpayer money,” Pete Cannito, chairman and CEO of the Jacksonville, Florida, space infrastructure company Redwire Corp., told a space defense conference in December 2025. “And they want to tap into that.” Nowhere is that private capital…
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in space has grown exponentially from the space shuttle days (1981-2011), when it focused on basic automation, system checks and data processing to improve safety and operational efficiency. AI now plays a crucial role in satellite collision avoidance, space exploration, enabling autonomous operations, and managing vast amounts of data from satellites and space telescopes. AI’s future role in space is expected to grow both in use and complexity. Here is a graphic representation. 3 Astrobee free-flying robots aboard the International Space Station. The cube-shaped, AI-powered robots — Bumble, Honey and Queen — work autonomously…
A small group of space operators played a big role across all warfighting domains in an exercise involving some 18,000 troops from the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK) during Freedom Shield 26. The space component of the 11-day March exercise was spearheaded by the S7 training and development directorate of U.S. Space Forces-Korea (SPACEFOR-KOR), a subordinate unit of U.S. Space Forces-Indo Pacific (SPACEFOR-INDOPAC). The four-member S-7 directorate scales up to more than a dozen personnel during Freedom Shield 26, boosted by experts from space mission areas and liaisons from the ROK Air Force’s Space Operations Group. They…
The United States and Israel have destroyed two Iranian facilities for military space operations as part of Operation Epic Fury, constraining Tehran’s ability to coordinate attacks and gather information from orbit. “We’ve … struck Iran’s equivalent of Space Command, which degrades their ability to threaten Americans,” Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, said during a March 5 press briefing. In an attack on March 8, Israeli Defense Forces reportedly destroyed an Iranian base focused on building technologies to destroy adversaries’ satellites. The base had been used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to promote its aerospace efforts,…
As about 8,000 troops from 30 countries trained on beaches and in jungles across Thailand at Exercise Cobra Gold 2026, members of the United States Space Force made it their mission to further integrate space as a warfighting domain. “Integrating space from the outset ensures the joint force operates with synchronized effects across air, land, maritime, cyber and space,” said U.S. Space Force Maj. Jonathan Brydie. “Space superiority is now as vital as air superiority in modern conflict.” The U.S. and Thailand co-hosted the 45th annual Exercise Cobra Gold from February 23 to March 6, bringing multinational Soldiers together to…
In the predawn darkness before Operation Epic Fury burst into public view, the first blows against Iran were struck by forces orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth. What unfolded, before the obliteration of hundreds of targets, Pentagon officials say, was the onset of major combat operations in space and cyberspace. “As always, operational security was paramount as we sought to maintain and sustain the element of surprise,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon briefing March 2. “The first movers were U.S. CYBERCOM and U.S. SPACECOM, layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and…
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has filed to reserve orbital slots and radio spectrum for constellations of more than 200,000 satellites, a move seen as an attempt to slow advances in satellite communications from the United States and its partners. The massive filing amounts to four times more satellites than the 50,000 planned by dominant orbital operator SpaceX. Questions are being raised within the industry about whether Chinese firms can manufacture and operate these megaconstellations within the seven-year deployment window required by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations agency that facilitates global connectivity. The CCP submitted its filing…