Who Builds, Who Depends? Spacepower, Space System Builders, and Infrastructural Dependencies

Dr Bleddyn Bowen, Associate Professor of Astropolitics and Co-Director of the Space Research Centre at Durham University, is a leading expert on spacepower whose work has consistently challenged the dominant framing of the military and security dimensions of space, and in particular the assumption that the dynamics we are seeing today represent something fundamentally new. Bowen’s scholarship consistently emphasises continuity, historical perspective, and strategic context over narratives of technological disruption and revolutionary change.

In a recent interview with Counterspace Insights, he develops that argument directly, suggesting that fears of a new era of conflict in space misread how much of the current situation is continuous with the past. Much of the anxiety from the 1980s about the end of space as a sanctuary remains directly relevant today, and many of the so-called transformative anti-satellite technologies presented as novel are simply updated versions of systems that were already in development decades ago.

As Bowen sets out in his open access article ‘The perils of periodising astropolitics: Space security and the system builders’ (2026), published in the European Journal of International Security, the structural conditions of the space age have been in place for decades: concentrated launch capacity, sovereign system builders, and the dependence of most spacefaring states on a handful of providers. What has changed is not the structure but the visibility of its consequences.

The threat to space systems is real and growing. What is not new is the basic fact of competition and risk in orbit. What is new, and what European policy has only recently begun to address, is the depth of the infrastructural dependencies that decades of reliance on foreign orbital infrastructures have created.

The Cosmic Coastline

Bowen presents a distinctive perspective on the space domain, describing it as a ‘cosmic coastline’ rather than the high-ground battlefield or distant frontier of popular imagination.

The metaphor is deliberately maritime. Coastlines sit within reach of the political and military authority of the states behind them. They host navies and fishing fleets, ports and customs houses, scientific stations and tourist beaches, all in the same stretch of water. They are crowded, contested, and quietly essential to the countries that depend on them.

Space looks much more like this than the empty frontier of popular imagination. Low Earth orbit begins only a few hundred kilometres above the Earth, closer than London is to Edinburgh, and it is traversed by infrastructure that serves terrestrial users: navigation, communications, weather forecasting, financial timing, and intelligence. The actors operating there are the same states, corporations, and agencies that operate terrestrially, pursuing the same interests by orbital means.

The implication matters. If space is continuous with the political world below rather than separate from it, strategy cannot treat space as a specialist concern walled off from defence planning. It has to treat it as part of the integrated picture. The cosmic coastline is no longer something European strategy can keep at a distance. It is where strategy now lives.

Spacepower Begins on Earth

Bowen’s 2020 acclaimed monograph War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics provides the conceptual tools for understanding how power actually operates in the orbital domain, not by prescribing answers, but by grounding analysis in the same actors, interests and rivalries that shape politics everywhere else.

Power in the orbital domain is not primarily the capacity to destroy a foreign satellite. It is the capacity to provide, and to protect what is provided: positioning, navigation, timing, communications, observation, and the targeting layer that modern military operations increasingly run on. Satellites function as critical infrastructure rather than as discrete platforms. They are the timing layer that financial markets and telecommunications networks depend on, the intelligence backbone behind operational planning, and the communications layer that underpins NATO interoperability. Remove any of these under strain, and the consequences arrive on Earth in systems that citizens and businesses depend on daily, and that armed forces cannot operate without.

Real power therefore sits with the space system builders: the few actors that control launch, satellite manufacturing, and navigation systems on a sovereign scale. The United States and China stand in their own league. Europe, Russia, India, and Japan occupy a tier below. The concentration is not loosening. Over 90 states now have a satellite presence, but launch capacity is held by fewer than 10 political entities, and the most consequential capabilities by even fewer. The conversation about space security is, in practice, the conversation about who provides what to whom, and on what terms.

What This Means For Europe

European strategic exposure in space did not begin in 2022, but it became visible then. The suspension of Russian Soyuz launches from Kourou disrupted Galileo deployment schedules, suspended ExoMars, and forced European missions onto alternative launch vehicles. The immediate consequences were operational. The deeper consequence was diagnostic. European access to orbit had been, in part, a service provided by an actor with whom Europe was simultaneously in deepening confrontation. The vulnerability had been there for years. It only became visible when the service stopped.

Galileo is the longer-running version of the same lesson. European policymakers initiated the development of the sovereign satellite navigation system in 1999 because reliance on US GPS for civilian and military positioning was understood, even then, as a strategic exposure. The underlying logic was straightforward: critical services require sovereign or co-controlled provision.

The commercial dimension is newer and harder to manage. The Starlink case in Ukraine has shown how decisively a single commercial actor can shape the operational reality of modern conflict. The constellation became central to Ukrainian military communications, and decisions by its operator about whether and where service would function became operational facts for military planning. Commercial space infrastructure is increasingly part of how defence operates, but the contracts, governance frameworks, and emergency arrangements that should sit underneath that dependence have not kept pace.

Bowen is direct about the structural challenges Europe faces. Europe sits in the second tier of space system builders, with the potential to meet most of its space needs from within its own industry, but it remains, in his account, politically incoherent. National governments still think in terms of national industries rather than European industry. Until that changes, Europe’s ambitions in space will continue to be constrained by national fragmentation.

The EU’s Secure Connectivity Programme, which is set to launch the IRIS² constellation in 2029, and continued investment behind Galileo, are responses that recognise the problem. How they develop, and what else they sit alongside, will shape what comes next.

A Key Pillar of Modern Defence

There is one further point in Bowen’s analysis that often gets lost in debates focused narrowly on anti-satellite weapons. Even with the most ambitious counterspace capabilities, the assumption that an adversary’s orbital infrastructure can be reliably suppressed is not a foundation on which any serious force can build. As Bowen argues, no serious force can bank on taking out an adversary’s space systems entirely. Complete denial of access to space is not possible, so terrestrial forces must be able to operate against a space-supported enemy regardless.

This serves as Europe’s practical lesson: in modern defence, space is essential.

The questions Europe must answer about its infrastructural dependencies in space are not technical footnotes. They sit at the heart of defence policy. Whether and how they are answered will shape what kind of space power Europe becomes, and on whose terms.