Image: Aerosociety
By Mark Piesing,
Published by Aero Society, 2 October 2026
Can the UK defend itself from a space ambush? MARK PIESING reports from the UK Space Power Conference.
On the opening morning of the UK Space Power Conference 2026, held in London on 23–24 September, the UK Ministry of Defence revealed the existence of No. III Space Effects Squadron, describing it as the UK’s first unit dedicated to ‘disrupt, degrade, and deny hostile threats in space’.
Later in the day, defence sources revealed that the unit had a ground-based capability that could temporarily dazzle or jam a satellite from a hostile country, without causing physical destruction or leaving dangerous space debris – and that it may have already done so. This capability, most likely, but not confirmed to be an electronic warfare capability, could have been used to stop foreign satellites from tracking the submarines of Britain’s strategic deterrent and special forces operations.
Science fiction becomes science fact
This is a capability the UK’s armed forces have desperately needed. “The challenges in space increasingly mirror the geopolitics on Earth,” said the Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Defence. “Our adversaries are investing heavily in sci-fi weaponry that can take out our satellite systems and technology.”
Whether the UK has any orbital space weapons like its superpower adversaries remains unclear. In May 2026, five Russian satellites performed threatening manoeuvres close to two commercial Finnish surveillance satellites reputed to provide intelligence to Ukraine. In June, NATO confirmed that a Russian satellite constellation had regularly disrupted GPS over Europe, Greenland and Canada during the last seven years. In September, a fire at a Starlink satellite station in central Poland was called a deliberate “act of sabotage” by a government minister.
Now it does not take a thriller writer like Tom Clancy to imagine that the next step in the Russian campaign might be a surprise attack on Britain’s space capabilities to cause chaos in its economy and incapacitate its military. US Space Command and US Cyber Command were the ‘first movers’ in the Iran War, helping US forces strike more than 1,000 Iranian targets in the campaign’s first 24 hours.
A tempting target
Britain’s support for Ukraine and its dependency on space must make it a tempting target for the Kremlin. Around 18% of the UK’s GDP depends on space services. A GPS outage could cause £1.4bn in economic damage to the UK’s economy every day. As in so many countries, public services in the UK has become dependent on space, so their shutdown would cause a cascade of failure and chaos across the country as the emergency services, the electricity supply, food logistics, and communications and financial systems all collapsed, with huge ramifications, including potential social disorder.
“A prerequisite for modern air power”
The UK military would likely be incapacitated by such a Russian ambush as well. “Space is…a prerequisite for modern air power,” said ACM Sir Harv Smyth, Chief of the Air Staff, Royal Air Force, during his keynote speech at the Air and Space Power Association conference. “Every element of a sixth-generation air force depends intimately on space, the networks, the targeting, the navigation, the command and control…an uncrewed force is broadly a space-dependent force, once again reinforcing the importance of this vital domain defence.
“We often refer to space as the ultimate high ground, through which the integrated force gains a decisive operational edge, enabling it to act with greater speed, better precision, and overall better effectiveness. It is an advantage we must maintain, and if possible, deny to our adversaries.”
The question then – and a question that indirectly the Space Power Conference set out to answer – is can the UK defend itself from such a space ambush? According to Streeting, “between 2019 and 2021, the combined Chinese and Russian operational satellite fleets grew by 70%. What this shows is that not only do our adversaries have the capability to threaten our national interests and national security, but they also have the intent. And that requires us to act.”
The UK’s ability to act in the event of a surprise space attack, or to deter such an attack, depends on its allies in NATO and elsewhere, as well as in its military’s space domain awareness – and this in turn depends on the network of sensors it can build on Earth, or place in orbit.
Going DARC
According to Smyth, Britain is building a network of such sensors, from the existing Fylingdales (the UK’s primary space sensor) to its new Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability. Known as DARC, this will enable Britain to detect, identify and track objects in the deepest of orbits from sites in Britain, the US and Australia.
The ground-based Fylingdales and DARC are now joined by the UK’s first military orbital space telescopes. Their data feeds directly into Borealis, a fast data-processing space awareness software operated by the National Space Operations Centre. The next generation of sensors will soon join them. Using neuromorphic technology, this will allow the UK to monitor events in orbit over a large volume of space with less power consumption, delay and bandwidth.
Yet it is clear Britain’s ability to deter a space ambush, or respond promptly to one, also depends on the country’s acquiring an assured space launch capability, even if it means throwing away decades of free market industrial policy. “The UK, and Europe more broadly, cannot afford to be dependent on others for space,” said Matt Collins, Executive Deputy National Security Advisor (Intelligence, Defence and Security), in a Cabinet Office keynote address. “We need to expand our spaceport infrastructure to insulate us from potential geopolitical shock…This is why government is now a stakeholder in SaxaVord, having made a £30m investment in the project to deliver sovereign polar launch capability.” In the long term, Collins added, the government intended to “secure equatorial launch through strategic partnerships.”
Go/No Go? A UK launch by the end of the year?
SaxaVord Spaceport, on the island of Unst in the Shetland Islands, is a commercial launch site being developed as the UK’s first vertical-launch spaceport, aimed at sending small satellites into polar and sun-synchronous orbits. Addressing concerns that the first launch from the site has been delayed again, Baroness Lloyd of Effra CBE, Minister for Space, Cyber and Regulatory Reform told AEROSPACE that “SaxaVord is vital for national security,” and when pressed, that “there are two or three more launch windows before the end of the year”.
It became clear during the UK Space Power Conference that the government investment in SaxaVord is just one part of its £7.8bn plan to build a more resilient UK space industry that can survive and respond to such incidents as a space ambush.
This ranges from new ‘One Government’ approaches to space procurement, ensuring that government departments work together to develop and procure space systems, to more targeting specific ‘national champions’ in space industry, as it were, to keep world-class innovators in the UK and deliver the required sovereign strategic capabilities, even if it means overcoming the MoD’s apparent reluctance to use private capital. Across the Atlantic, for every $1 the US Space Force’s commercial innovation fund invests its matched by over $2 from the private sector.
“Our vision is for the UK to be a competitive space power; assertive in protecting our interests and driving our growth,” said Lloyd. “This is about demonstrating to our allies – and our adversaries too – that we are serious in our intent and our resolve in space.”
The conference also contained a warning for the UK space industry itself: that the dual-use nature of space technology means that it and its supply chain are likely to be considered legitimate targets for Russian cyberattacks – and they had to prepare accordingly.
For a long time, the UK government has assumed it can rely on the US to protect its national interests in space in the event of a conflict. The rush to build up its space capabilities suggests that this is no longer the case.
The government has laid out its plans. The proof will be in what happens.
See: Original Article
