The New High Ground: Protecting the UK's Critical Infrastructure in Space
Some of the UK’s most important defence assets are orbiting silently above our heads, and protecting them is becoming one of the defining defence challenges of our time.
In May 2026, the MoD announced that Borealis, a new space domain awareness system, had reached operational status six months ahead of schedule. Borealis is designed to do something technically complex: give the UK a faster, clearer picture of everything in Earth’s orbit. It fuses data from multiple sources, including imagery from the Noctis-1 military telescope, released publicly for the first time alongside the announcement, to track satellites, debris and potentially hostile objects. Crucially, it feeds directly into the National Space Operations Centre, giving military and government the decision-quality information they need to respond to threats before they become crises. The system also provides the UK with an increasingly sovereign space domain awareness capability while enabling closer collaboration with allies and partners.
The reason is straightforward: infrastructure in space is critical national infrastructure. Nearly 20% of UK GDP is reliant on satellite services. GPS, financial transactions, weather forecasting, emergency service communications and military communications all depend on that infrastructure. Until recently, the UK had limited ability to actively monitor and understand activity in orbit, and as space becomes increasingly congested and contested, maintaining visibility is essential. Adversaries are developing capabilities specifically designed to threaten space assets, whether through jamming, spoofing, directed energy weapons or co-orbital systems that can manoeuvre close to and interfere with satellites, so this is firmly a matter for defence.
As the threat evolves, Borealis alone is not the whole solution. Project NOVA, a new global network of optical ground telescopes being built by the UK Space Agency, will extend the UK’s monitoring reach further, providing early warning of potential collisions and tracking hazardous objects across a wider arc of orbit. Alongside Noctis-1, a second sovereign military telescope, Noctis-2, is expected to further strengthen the UK’s ability to generate and exploit its own space surveillance data. Together, these initiatives reflect a growing recognition that space domain awareness is critical to national security. After all, you cannot defend what you cannot see.
For the UK defence and security community, the Borealis announcement is more than a milestone. It is a recognition that space is no longer an environment where assets can be taken for granted. The next significant conflict could easily involve a space dimension, and with satellite systems underpinning communications, defence operations, critical services and financial infrastructure, the vulnerabilities are real. As defence spending increases and investment in sovereign space capabilities continues, programmes such as Borealis demonstrate a broader commitment to ensuring the UK can monitor, protect and defend its interests in orbit while working closely with international partners.
Being serious about space protection now, while the architecture is still being built, is better than trying to retrofit under pressure. The UK is moving in the right direction; it just has to maintain pace.