By Daniel Molland,
Published by Space News, 25 September 2026
The UK Space Strategy 2026 makes control of space its leading defense priority, then names none of the technology needed to deliver it.
With the announcement of the new UK Space Strategy 2026, Britain has formally recognized that space is now a contested military domain. Nevertheless, recognizing the threat is not the same as acquiring the means to confront it. It puts defense and national security ahead of everything as the first of its two outcomes. It names control of space as a strategic requirement and a component of national power — in plain terms, protecting and defending U.K. interests in, from and through space. It also makes a useful industrial shift, moving to fewer, higher-value awards and acting as an anchor customer through the new Enterprise Space category, backing companies with flight heritage and a route to market rather than spreading thin grants across the field. Each of those is the right call; the sector is right to welcome them.
The strategy gets all this right and then declines to fund the thing it has just called the priority. It selects four subsectors for faster development and dedicated funding: satellite communications, space domain awareness, in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) and access to space. Space control is not one of them, despite its being the area needed to achieve those national security objectives. It survives only as a cross-cutting requirement to be delivered through SDA and ISAM, with its money folded into a single 880 million pound ($1.18 billion) Ministry of Defense line shared with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance across 2026/27 to 2029/30, and its roadmap deferred to a future defense space policy update. The strategy names national security as its number-one priority and then prioritizes none of the technology that would deliver it.
This is not a government unwilling to say what space control is for. It reads more like a document co-written by a department nervous about being honest with the rest of the space sector about what control of space actually means. The Defense Investment Plan 2026 calls space a contested frontline, states that defense will deliver the capabilities necessary to fight and win and commits to increased investment in offensive and defensive space control. The government’s reluctance is understandable. Space control raises difficult questions about escalation, offensive capabilities and the militarization of orbit. Avoiding precise language does not make those questions disappear. It merely leaves Britain without a credible plan for responding when its satellites are jammed, approached or attacked.
The gap is not entirely the government’s doing. The U.K. space industry has for years buried the discussion of space control, and of protecting national infrastructure in orbit, under the ISAM banner, on the strength of some shared technology between the two. The better-informed half of the sector knows the two have about as much in common as flying an F-35 on a ground-attack mission has with flying an A320 into Gatwick. Both put an aircraft in the air and fly it to a point in the sky. But only one delivers national security effects.
The technology space control needs will not come from further ISAM funding. Space control needs innovation funding to develop effectors to deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive or destroy an adversary system. It needs fire control-quality systems to engage a specific, non-cooperative target and battle management fast enough to turn an SDA track into an engagement while the target is still acquirable. A servicing spacecraft that grapples a cooperative client provides almost none of it, aside from a good vantage point from which to watch our adversaries wilfully disrupt our CNI.
A government can only back a winner in a category it has defined. By leaving space control off the funded list, the strategy gives itself no route to back the companies building these systems or to buy what they produce. The money will follow the missions that carry a commercial story, up to 77 million pounds for the National Active Debris Removal Mission and 40 million for an ISAM demonstrator, while the capabilities that only government will ever buy in order to deliver space power will stay unfunded.
The fix is for the government to get serious about funding and prioritizing the technologies space control needs, rather than hiding behind the ISAM banner. Space control should be a named priority capability area in its own right, separate from ISAM and SDA, with an earmarked line for effectors and targeting and a demand signal through the Enterprise Space category. The forthcoming defense space policy should state how the U.K. will field counterspace, with a budget attached, rather than deferring the question again. Until it does, the U.K. has committed to controlling a domain while paying only to watch and service it, which is all show and no go.
Daniel Molland is Chief Technology Officer of Shield Space, a UK company developing sovereign space control capability.
See: Original Article
