Interview with Dr Bleddyn Bowen: Power in Space, Who Holds It, and Europe’s Position

Space is commanding more attention than ever, but the sobriety and historical sensibility that the subject demands have not kept pace.

We had the opportunity to speak with Dr Bowen, Associate Professor of Astropolitics and Co-Director of the Space Research Centre at Durham University, about how power in space actually works, the structural conditions that underpin it, and what this means for European defence.

The conversation covered the misconception that conflict in space is a future scenario rather than a present condition, his concept of space as a ‘cosmic coastline’ rather than the next frontier of warfare, spacepower defined by the sophistication of an actor’s orbital infrastructure rather than solely by its counterspace capabilities, where Europe stands in relation to the United States and China, and what often gets lost in debates focused narrowly on anti-satellite weapons.

Europe’s infrastructural dependencies in orbit are not new, but since 2022 they have received the recognition long called for by space policy experts: that strengthening Europe’s position in space is now central to security, competitiveness, and resilience. The conversation that follows is about what that means.

You argue that space is best understood not as a distant frontier but as something more like a coastline: continuous with Earth and shaped by the same politics, rather than a separate realm with its own logic. What does thinking of space as a “cosmic coastline” help us understand that the usual “final frontier” picture misses?

It’s important to contrast it with what the US Space Force calls “the ultimate high ground” and what John F. Kennedy called “this new ocean.” What the cosmic coastline argues is that what happens in space is not very far away. It’s very close to where we live. Everything of economic and military importance happens in a relatively thin band of orbital space above us, between 200 and 40,000 kilometres altitude. Forty thousand kilometres sounds far, but when you are engaging with things that happen at the speed of light, it is not. Compared to that, the moon is ten times further away. Beyond 40,000 kilometres there are very few satellites that have any day-to-day infrastructural impact.

So rather than being a big distant ocean where ships can easily miss each other or hide, we’re in a very confined, more coastal environment, with clear patterns of traffic, some routes more efficient than others, but a crowded environment and a geographically confined one. It’s like a busy coastal zone, perhaps even a strait. It’s hemmed in by terrestrial dynamics that shape how satellites fly around the planet. And like a busy coastal environment, it’s populated by a very wide range of actors: big states, small states, private actors, all sorts of different players.

The “ultimate high ground”, by contrast, is mostly just a statement that we get very good views from space, like sitting on top of a hill above a battlefield. What matters is the interaction that happens in both ways between Earth orbit and Earth itself. Those two domains are always in close interaction, and you can’t really do strategy without thinking about both at the same time. If you are a continental land power but have a coastline or a large navy, you still have to think about big land wars where there is a maritime element, usually in reference to large continental operations. Think about France, the Soviet Union, India, China. It’s not self-evident how things in space become relevant to things on Earth, but they do.

There is far more to military strategy in space than just holding the high ground; that is a passive strategy. If you sit on one clear advantage, a competent enemy will resist you in a way that negates it. History is full of militaries that sit on the high ground and still lose. It’s a good place to put imagery satellites, but its real influence runs across all terrestrial domains through space services: precision warfare, mobile command and control, satellite early warning. The simple high-ground analogy doesn’t get at that. It’s the same problem continental strategists have had with sea power, which influences land wars in lots of different ways. It can be immediate and tactical, such as amphibious operations or coastal flanking. Or it can be long-term: economic warfare, blockades, sanctions. Space similarly supports those things. We’re not anywhere near amphibious operations from space; we’re not dropping troops from orbit, but the impact space services have on modern weapons is tactical and immediate. If you take out enough GPS satellites, the US military would notice that quite immediately.

Why does it matter, practically, whether we treat space as separate from Earth or continuous with it?

You need to do both, really. It’s neither one or the other. You need space specialists. Just because you can fly a plane doesn’t mean you understand anything about satellites. It’s a different kind of knowledge. You might be able to command an aircraft carrier, but do you know how to operate the GPS constellation? You know how to use it; you don’t know how to maintain it.

We’re seeing this across military organisations. The US Space Force; space divisions within the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic forces; Russia’s Naval Space Forces; space units within the French Air Force; the UK’s Space Command. You need that specialism, and you also need to understand the politics and history of the environment, and why we’ve done things the way we have. What does the Outer Space Treaty actually allow you to do, and not do? What might space operators consider reasonable within international humanitarian law on counterspace operations?

But space specialists can’t exist in a vacuum, literally or figuratively. Everything they do has to be relevant to what happens on Earth, and space won’t always have the solution. Just because something can be done in space doesn’t mean it should. So, space people need to be talking to their terrestrial counterparts in every service. Space has to be relevant, but the generalists have to understand that space is its own thing as well. The major challenge of any multi-service military force is getting that dialogue to work.

And then there’s communicating with the policymakers who control budgets. You can have an air show or a cocktail party on your ship. What kind of space-force equivalent is there? You can display a rocket launch, but those are pre-scheduled. In terms of bureaucratic politics, there are limits in how visible space can be. Once the satellites are doing their jobs, you can’t see them. They’re points of data on a spreadsheet, service losses, and issues with logistics. Many politicians and top military officials don’t want to bother with the logistics, they just want the logistics to work.

In your recent paper “The perils of periodising astropolitics: Space security and the system builders”, published in the European Journal of International Security in March 2026, you push back on the idea that we’ve entered a dramatic “new space age,” proposing instead that we’ve been in one continuous space age since 1957. Why does the “new age” story mislead us?

That academic paper, which is open access, is about how there are three big trends people identify as marking a new age, none of which actually qualify as a revolution in political affairs in space.

The first is democratisation. Many people think we’re in a second space age after 1991, because more states and private companies became active. There are now over 90 states with satellites, compared to very few in the Cold War. But what we mean by democratisation here is very superficial. People think that more countries with satellites make the political regime in space democratic. If you do political science and look at democratisation, you must talk about how an institution is actually democratic in its processes. It is not simply about numbers of members or enfranchisements; you still need a democratic system to call something democratic. You have had an increase in space actors, but it’s been gradual through the space age. 1991 wasn’t a turning point, and while the acceleration came after 2011, that’s not a turning point many people have noticed.

Even with 90-plus states active, all of them depend on a very small number of launch providers: nine or ten states with the ability to launch satellites. Treating Europe as one actor, the big six are the United States, China, Europe, Russia, India and Japan. Iran has achieved it but given their current situation I’m not sure when they’ll be back to launch. You have South Korea and North Korea, totalling nine actors. And depending on your view of New Zealand, which hosts Rocket Lab, you could maybe count a tenth, but in reality it’s an American company doing most of that. If you’re one of the dozens of countries trying to use space, you usually go through six political entities, and even then, the US and China are launching far more than everyone else. There’s no democracy in space governance, no institution that resolves disputes democratically. It’s the UN system and power politics, and the system we have today is the system we’ve had for decades.

The second trend is commercialisation: the hype around new space, that commercial actors now displace the state. But people have confused private ownership with private demand. The global space economy still relies on public spending, and the big companies, including SpaceX, the poster boy for these claims, still depend on the US government as their main customer to be profitable. Yes, there has been more outsourcing and the private sector is more capable than it was forty years ago, but it is not a social, economic or political revolution. The public and private sectors have always been intertwined. Political and economic elites have always managed and co-developed these huge infrastructures for military and civilian purposes.

What we’re seeing is more of a normalisation of space, with more private sector involvement to meet the other parts of the military industry where the private sector has always been. On a deeper level, this is the way we’ve always done public-private relationships with complicated infrastructure. It’s outsourcing. It’s the contractor state. You can go back hundreds of years to such setups, where even the absolute monarchies of Europe outsourced arms production to private landowners who had the factories, ores and mines. The private sector was there at the start of the space age too. When governments built the space programmes, private companies were contracted to fabricate everything. You can look at Russia and China differently since they liberalised their economies after the Cold War, but outside the communist world the private sector has always been involved.

The third trend is militarisation. Some people, including senior US Space Force figures, argue we are in a third space age because of threats from Russia and China and that space as a sanctuary has ended. But you can read material from the 1980s saying the same thing: space sanctuary is over because the Soviets are developing anti-satellite weapons. Anti-satellite weapons are not new, and many of these technologies are simply remakes of systems from the 1980s.

It’s true that Russia, China and the United States are developing more sophisticated anti-satellite weapons, including space-based ones, and conducting more rendezvous and proximity operations. There’s more of it happening. Regarding space no longer being a sanctuary: in the Cold War the superpowers were ready to shoot at each other’s satellites. They were working on the systems, and they were probably going to detonate nukes in space if they really needed to. So, it’s not to say there’s no threat from Russia and China, and that the US isn’t doing it as well. It’s just not a political or strategic revolution; we’ve been here before. It’s important to see continuity and not panic. Lots of weapons have been deployed and turned out not to be that useful. We must be politically creative and open-minded about these things, rather than fatalistic. The narrative of a new space age doesn’t work, even though the rising threat to space systems is materially getting worse. It’s not a new era.

Spacepower is often imagined in terms of weapons and confrontations in orbit, but in practice it rests on everyday systems: navigation, communications, intelligence, timing. Your work treats spacepower as being about infrastructure rather than just weapons. What does looking at it that way reveal that gets missed when the focus is only on weapons?

This borrows from sea-power theory, where some theorists, notably Julian Corbett, criticised others for being obsessed with battle. In sea power, the obsession was the manoeuvres of a big battle fleet, seeking out the enemy battle fleet to force a decisive engagement and decide the war. Whereas the reality was that you only enter battle if you are certain of winning, or if the stakes make it worth risking ships, you can’t replace them quickly. If you could deny battle, stay in the fight and keep your assets alive, you would.

Corbett argued that one of the most difficult things maritime commanders had to do was not actually try to win battles but force the enemy into battle. While enemy fleets chase each other, other uses of the sea carry on, and challenging those other uses has more strategic impact than chasing the battle fleet. Some maritime forces have done this. The Spanish gave the slip to the American fleet a few times in the Spanish-American War, totally wasting their time when the prize was Cuba.

What that means in space is that battle has its place, and if you have opportunities to inflict heavy losses on the enemy, you take them. But there’s much more to space warfare and strategy than that. Acts of space warfare only matter so long as they contribute to the overall purpose of the war and to who can use outer space. If destroying enemy space systems significantly depletes your own ability to use space, the battle is pointless. There can be pointless or wasteful battles. American strategy still hasn’t learned a lot of this, even after Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran. You can win battles all you like, but if it isn’t matched to the strategy, the other side has options.

So perhaps going first with a massive offensive against enemy space systems isn’t the wisest course. Donald Rumsfeld, in his 2001 Space Commission report, popularised the idea of a “space Pearl Harbor”. I’ll give him points for drama, but I’ll deduct points for triggering a wave of dogmatic thinking. The argument was that America faced a massive threat from an adversary that would launch strikes against all of America’s space systems at the start of a war, crippling US precision-warfare capabilities, global command and control, missile early warning, the lot. That’s a battle-centric view: space warfare becomes “how do we stop the enemy from doing that first strike?” Well, with our own first strike. You get into a mechanistic logic loop. The logic is internally valid, but it’s very restricted; it’s a possibility, not an inevitability.

The other possibility is that a war starts and nothing happens in space in terms of anti-satellite operations. Like maritime warfare, you may not have a big decisive battle early, or at all. There might be clashes at a smaller scale, later in the war, when they make more of a difference, or when one side decides this is the moment to do it because of other plans in motion. In a China-America war over Taiwan, it’s not obvious that China would be best served by throwing everything at the Americans straight away in space, and vice versa. There are rationales for keeping anti-satellite weapons in reserve. If I were the United States, I’d want the maximum anti-satellite campaign just as they’re crossing the strait, when they need space systems the most and are most vulnerable, which will be well into the conflict because they’ll first have to soften up Taiwan’s defences. This, again, is not an inevitability, but a possibility.

Strategic thinking must be open to these possibilities. It must ask: where do you want space services, and when? That is what ultimately matters in military space services. What services do you want from satellites? What impact are they having on terrestrial military power? When do you want to deny them to the enemy? My first book was on theory, and it’s about not telling you what the answers are but giving you the concepts and factors to apply to whatever situation you face. The answer is different every time.

So, battle is subordinate to where and when you want to control or deny outer space, where it makes the biggest difference. Controlling space and getting no benefit from it is pointless. Similarly with the sea, there’s no point having big battles if it doesn’t change who gets to use the sea. Battle has its place, but you can’t have a military culture dominated by battle-centric strategy.

Much of the current discussion about space conflict focuses on jamming, spoofing, proximity operations and other activities that fall short of open warfare. How should we think about this kind of competition, and is the grey-zone framing actually useful?

Holding things in reserve, giving the enemy the slip, denying battle while remaining in the fight, that’s what Corbett called “fleet in being”. You keep your forces in play, manipulating the enemy without giving battle. Germany did that with their main sea fleets in both world wars, with varying success, tying up much of the Royal Navy.

Similarly, less destructive engagements and operations outside open warfare, such as sabotage, subversion and espionage, happen all the time. The terms “hybrid warfare” and “grey-zone warfare” seem to come from very naive people who don’t realise that countries are always meddling with each other in the dark world of intelligence, military positioning and corporate espionage. If you’ve built a system that’s become critical infrastructure and you’ve not put in the protections needed to keep out anyone but the most determined cyber intruders, what are you doing? That’s your fault, not the enemy, because you left the door open. There’s been a lot of naivety in the commercial space sector for the past 15 to 20 years on this. I think attitudes are changing, but space systems are being targeted and will continue to be, through computer-network operations, lasers, and jamming. Many of those things happen accidentally too, especially jamming and electronic warfare, and they will continue purposefully as well whether there are open hostilities or not.

What’s arguably newer, in terms of what we’re being told about, is the close proximity operations by the Russians against US, NATO and Japanese satellites: close flying, intimidation, buzzing, like what they do to spy planes on Earth. In terms of wider politics, it’s not new behaviour, but it’s happening in space and much more closely than before. China has also mastered space-tug operations with its Shi-Jian satellites. There are lots of good uses for getting rid of old satellites, but it doesn’t take much to change that into a weapon system either.

It’s a political judgement what you call these things. And by the time you figure out the difference between grey zone and hybrid warfare, there’ll be another term to describe the exact same thing. When I was a war studies student, “asymmetric warfare” was the buzzword.

You’ve argued that real power in space sits with a handful of what you call “space system builders.” Who really holds that power today, and is the concentration growing or loosening?

The United States and China are in their own leagues. They are the two largest space powers, and they are single coherent states.

Russia is on a decline. It’s becoming more dependent on the Chinese. It has started building Chinese-designed satellites. Years ago, it was Russia exporting technology to China; now it’s the other way around. Russia is spending all its resources on maintaining its critical satellite infrastructures for military and civil uses, and it’s not doing much R&D on new technologies. There isn’t really a commercial industry. It’s all state-owned and state-run, and the Russian economy is falling off a cliff. So Russia is still technically impressive, but it’s going to continue declining.

Japan and India are interesting. Japan has competencies in all the necessary areas, and has the strategic footholds where if there’s political will, it can expand. But there are limits, especially demographic ones, on how much it can do alone. Japan is a single state, so it can effectively direct resources in a national programme. India is a wild card. There’s enormous potential. Similarly to Europe and Japan, it has competencies in every major area of space technology. But it’s struggling with resources and people. Despite its demographic bonus, India still has internal economic problems and political issues. We’ll see how far we are from a post-Modi India. Democratic politics is shifting against him. India can do a lot more than it’s already doing if it really decides to.

So, Europe, Japan and India are not at the same level as the US and China. Russia sits between those camps, still very capable but unlikely to get massively more capable, and only economically weaker as time goes on.

Europe relies heavily on allies and commercial providers for critical space capabilities. Where does Europe actually stand as a space power today, and what would it take to strengthen its position?

Europe is politically incoherent. You have layers of institutions and the member states of the European Space Agency and the European Union, two separate institutions for now. Coordinating Europe to act is very difficult. You have a lot of language to describe Europe in strategic-autonomous terms, but national governments are still thinking in terms of national state industries, not European industry. Unless Europe changes that, it will continue to be hamstrung. Europe has the potential to keep up with China and the United States in being able to meet most of its space needs mostly within its own industry, but it will take time. And continental-scale thinking probably means it needs Britain in it as well.

Europe is more of a confederation than a state, and coordinating it is really difficult, as we all know. Over the long term, Europe is potentially better placed than Japan: it has competencies in all the necessary areas, and it’s much larger. But to actually realise that, the political incoherence must be addressed.

As militaries build space more deeply into how they plan and fight, what do they most need to get right, and where is the biggest gap between recognition and practice?

You have to have replaceable losses on Earth. You have to get ready to replace people and vehicles and ships, and aircraft that you’re going to lose. It’s not really about space itself, but space technology is making weapons much more precise and lethal, and what we’re seeing now that they’re being used a lot is that anything big and obvious is very likely to get hit.

In the West in particular, we must get back to the mentality of: you actually do need more than a couple of regiments in the army, if you’re serious about ground combat. You might need a minimum of three or four aircraft carriers if you’re serious about any proper deployments. Dozens of frigates rather than just six. Maybe several hundred fifth-generation fighters as opposed to a couple of dozen, because they’re not going to last very long. There’s always going to be a limit on what you can do against space systems, and you must get used to the fact that your enemy’s forces will have precision options available to them.

There’s no point having a very sophisticated military if it doesn’t last more than a day, because then you have a day-two problem and a day-three problem, and each day will get worse until you lose. So, it’s about dealing with the consequences of space-system support on the ground. Even if you have elaborated anti-satellite systems, you can’t bank your terrestrial strategy on complete enemy space suppression. You can’t guarantee that you’ll take out everything, so your terrestrial forces still need to be able to operate against a space-supported enemy. China and Russia are supplying space services to the countries or proxies fighting against Western forces. We’ve seen it already in Iran. We saw it in the Cold War too, where the Soviet Union supported African communist movements and governments with space intelligence.

That would be the one thing to take away. Otherwise, it’s all just “build more space systems” because everybody’s saying that.