Interview with James Black: Space Security, Dual Use and the Governance of the Orbital Domain

The conversation covers key issues in space security today. Why is it challenging to define dual use, and how does this impact governance? What problems make rendezvous and proximity operations hard to regulate? What are the implications of NATO’s Commercial Space Strategy for industry and commercial operators?

Since 2025, RAND has been convening senior stakeholders from across government, industry and international organisations for a series of workshops on managing Duality in Space. James Black offers a pragmatic and grounded assessment of where progress is possible and where the hard problems remain.

Dual use is a term that gets used constantly in discussions of space security, but defining it precisely proves surprisingly difficult. Why is that, and why does it matter?

It is partly because of basic disagreement about the lens through which we view this issue. Are we talking about how a system is designed and how it is intended to be used, how it is actually used in practice, or how it hypothetically could be used? Are we talking about who owns it and operates it, or just who benefits from whatever services or data or activities it delivers? Different states come at that from different angles – with potentially destabilising implications for space governance, security and escalation management.

At RAND we have been trying to keep it simple with our ongoing studies on Duality in Space, keep it plain English, and reflect the reality of how people broadly understand dual use. This means defining dual use as those space systems with capabilities that can support both civilian and military purposes, either in practice or by intent. I think that brings together a few different threads.

Why this also matters is that different coalitions of states are approaching this question from quite different angles. Most notably, countries particularly in Europe, the UK and the United States have been trying to focus less on the technical characteristics of a given space object and more on its behaviours and the effects of those behaviours, particularly if they are dangerous or damaging. By contrast, countries like Russia and China have broadly focused more on the hardware and technical aspects or properties of a satellite, including whether it is or is not a space weapon. Unpicking those sorts of disagreements is not just an academic debate. It is really crucial to understanding why we have not been able to make as much progress on space governance and strategic stability in the last few years as we might want and as a sustainable future for the space domain might urgently need.

Strategic ambiguity is another term that comes up frequently in discussions of space security. What does it actually mean in practice, and what are the policy challenges it creates?

Ambiguity is a real challenge in space. To be clear, not all threats in space are ambiguous. There are some things that are unambiguously bad and unambiguously malicious. But what we see a lot of day-to-day now are those so-called sub-threshold, deniable, ambiguous activities, sometimes called hybrid threats, sometimes called grey zone threats. What unites them is that they are talking about actions that are hostile but fall short of open war. They are purposely designed to exploit seams between institutions and thresholds of response.

So, for example, hostile actors go after an asset that perhaps is commercially or civilian-operated but important for government or military functions. They do not directly and permanently damage it through a kinetic strike, but they hold it at risk, either through cyber-attacks, through jamming and spoofing in the electromagnetic spectrum, or through potentially dangerous manoeuvres on orbit that at the very least might force that targeted satellite to move, which could interrupt the provision of some of its services, or at least make them less efficient, or use up finite propellant and degrade the lifetime of that asset on orbit.

These activities are calibrated to exploit the political and legal thresholds that democratic states typically require before responding. Countries like China and Russia know that those thresholds can be quite high for democracies seeking to avoid conflict. They know that you often need a lot of attribution and evidence that there has been a purposeful armed attack. They know that it is particularly hard to get consensus on that within an alliance of multiple countries, so they purposely try to calibrate their activities to exploit that.

David Kilcullen calls it liminal warfare: this idea of a liminal space, a band of ambiguous activity where you are pushing against thresholds, exploiting ambiguity, and ultimately testing the response from countries like the US, the UK, France or Germany. The danger is that if you are seen to overreact, then you can lose political support for that response, but equally if you seen to under-react and do nothing, you normalise a set of dangerous behaviours and invite more.

Crucially, space is what I would describe as a complex socio-technical system. There is a technical element – lots of very smart engineers working on how to make various technologies work in the punishing conditions of outer space, and trying to make space more commercially viable through technological innovation. But there is also a really important, and I think overlooked, social side. We do not have thousands and thousands of equivalents to the engineers. We have a small number of civil servants working in space agencies and policy departments, a small number of people in most militaries (at least outside of the US and China), and a very small number of people in think tanks and academia who think about this. So much of strategic instability and escalation dynamics in space ultimately comes down to human perception, our biases and limited information about what is really happening, and our lack of trust about other actors. You can probably never eliminate the ambiguity that comes from some of the hostile sub-threshold activities we see in space, because they purposely exploit ambiguity and the dual use nature of assets to get away with things they could not otherwise. But I think we can at least reduce that ambiguity and bound the problem by understanding what is and is not acceptable on orbit, shaping norms on responsible behaviors.

A big priority for a lot of countries therefore remains moving beyond just space situational awareness, understanding what is in space, where it is, where it is heading, to proper space domain awareness, where you combine that understanding with much more contextual intelligence about intent. Why are objects doing what they are doing? Is it malicious, and if so, who is behind it? Because it is only then that you can start talking about response options.

Then, we have to make sure we actually have the full toolkit of response options to employ as part of a credible but proportionate response. It cannot be that many important space-faring nations have limited options between a strongly worded letter and all-out war. You clearly need a variety of rungs on the escalation ladder in between. That is why we are seeing more and more small and medium powers outside of the U.S. and China now investing in their own non-kinetic counterspace capabilities, but also in deterrence by denial and resilience through redundancy, hardening of assets, bodyguard satellites, those sorts of things. None of those interventions individually solve the problem, but if you invest across that full suite of response options, you can have a much more calibrated response. We are ultimately trying to swing the cost calculus back in our favour, because it is pretty cheap and easy at the moment for a malicious actor to threaten us in these ways.

Rendezvous and proximity operations are one of the more complex governance challenges in the space domain. What makes them particularly difficult to govern, and how should policymakers approach that challenge?

You cannot take context out of any of this. An activity that might be sort of benign or tolerable if conducted in a certain part of space, at a certain time, or between assets from two countries that have good relations, might look quite different if it is happening in a different part of space at a different time, or between nations that are on the brink of war for other reasons.

That is why we need to move beyond just hand-waving assertions that dual use capabilities represent a risk or a threat, and start really pushing into what specific aspects of that capability and the specific effects of what behaviours cause what specific concerns for what specific actors, and therefore what can we do to mitigate them. That is what some of the work we are doing at RAND on Duality in Space is trying to get into, by understanding and bringing together different stakeholders from across government, military, academia and industry, from all these different countries, including not just the West but countries like China and Russia, and really trying to understand where the common ground is on what behaviours and effects are the most concerning. Where is there common ground that certain things are escalatory, and where is it still contested?

Because then you can start working out where there are areas where we can have a normative solution or perhaps even go for a slightly harder legal instrument. Where does outer space law already do a pretty good job but just needs to be applied better or reinterpreted slightly? And where are the areas where we are not likely to get agreement in the short term, but we can come up with other ways of avoiding conflict and de-escalating things if it does get out of hand, for example via transparency and confidence building mechanisms or communication channels for de-escalating in a crisis.

NATO’s Commercial Space Strategy deepens allied reliance on private sector capabilities. What does that shift mean in practice for industry, and where does responsibility sit for protecting assets that governments rely on but do not own?

The reality is that commercial space actors have to learn to live with difficult geopolitics and the growing security challenges on orbit, whether they like it or not. There is not an option to just pretend these things do not affect your business. A lot of the innovation in the last decade or two in space has really been driven by the private sector, and there has obviously been this explosion of growth in the space industry, particularly via the NewSpace segment. But it is ultimately underpinned by governments, either as key customers, including via military and intelligence agencies, or at the very least as regulators and as the bodies responsible for national defence. And that extends to monitoring, defending and protecting national space assets on orbit, even if they are civil or commercially operated. Space is increasingly enmeshed in all sorts of different parts of critical national infrastructure back on Earth, also. Those services are absolutely essential to our economies and to basic social functions, and so governments and militaries have both a mandate and a need to do more to protect them.

At the same time, it does not mean that all this falls on the public sector. The private sector needs to recognise that the continuity of business increasingly means threats to space security seriously, in the same way that it is the responsibility of government and national cyber centres to worry about national cyber defence, but that does not mean the rest of us do not have to worry about our own cyber security as individuals or as businesses. It is a collective effort.

What that means in practice is that industry needs to start thinking much more about resilience and redundancy. Some firms already do this well, but not all. What are their reversionary modes if something goes wrong? How do they continue to provide services if they are held at risk by malicious actors? Are they coordinating closely enough with national authorities or with groups like NATO? Are they thinking not just about short-term profitability but the long-term resilience of their businesses, including potentially to manage crisis or wartime scenarios? An obvious example would be ground stations. It costs money to have more of them, but if ground segments can be targeted and disrupted – or even destroyed, if conflict erupts – then having multiple backup installations is a better long-term investment. To draw an analogy, it means moving away from the just-in-time mentality that a lot of global industries had before Covid, which optimised for efficiency and near-term profit, towards the longer-term resilience-focused mindset that many non-space industries have had to adopt because of disruptions to global supply chains over the last five years. This is not just about businesses doing what is good for security. It is about businesses doing what is good for business in the long run.

If you read NATO assessments and the threat assessments of many individual NATO countries, there is a sizable chance of war in the next five years. We already have a major war in Europe with Russia and Ukraine. There is a sizable chance of a NATO-Russia conflict in future, or potentially between China and the US, and space would not be left out. It is therefore in the space industry’s direct benefit to consider these issues now. It cannot be the public sector underwriting space security. The private sector needs to continue to contribute, not just as a provider of technology to space commands, but as an active contributor to those discussions, and to try ultimately to reduce the burden on government so that government can focus its finite resources on those threats and risks that only the military and national security agencies, with their mandate, can address.

Since 2025, RAND has been convening senior stakeholders from across government, industry and international organisations for a series of workshops on managing Duality in Space[JB1] . What were the most significant findings, and what should policymakers and industry prioritise over the next decade?

Our recent European workshop was part of a wider series we have been doing with different regional stakeholders. We are near the end of the second year of a three-year project looking at duality in space and how you manage the governance and security challenges around it. We have convened workshops and tabletop exercises across the Americas, the Indo-Pacific and Europe, bringing together key stakeholders from different backgrounds, government, civilian, military, think tank, academia and industry, but also from countries that might not necessarily agree, who share equity in space but potentially have quite different views on what governance of space should look like in future.

I think the key takeaway is that there is hope, but it requires pragmatism. We need to assume the dual use nature of space systems and try to avoid attempts to distinguish dual use systems from non-dual use systems, and get away from an excessive focus on hardware: what is a space weapon, and what is not a space weapon. If instead you start looking at a more behaviour or effect-based framework, looking at the specifics of activities and what it is about a particular behaviour that causes concern, you can find some common ground between nations. And critically, you can start to identify where existing norms, regulation and treaties already cover the problem and where the genuine gaps lie. That is an important point because it means we do not always need new instruments. Sometimes the law or conventions already do a pretty good job but just needs to be applied better or reinterpreted slightly for the space context.

There are practical questions to resolve. If a satellite is moving close to another satellite, how close is too close? We can start putting numbers on some of those questions. Is it different in low Earth orbit versus geosynchronous Earth orbit? Is it different depending on whether that approaching satellite belongs to an operator with whom you can easily communicate versus one you cannot? You can start working that problem now. And when you do, you find that a lot of stakeholders share quite pragmatic views, despite their wider political or policy differences.

We also do not need to find complete global consensus to make some progress. By taking a regional approach, you can work with actors to establish that this given set of behaviours we all agree are acceptable, this given set of behaviours we all agree are very much not acceptable, and there is maybe a group of behaviours in the middle that remain contested. But at least we have reduced the uncertainty and scope of the problem. We can now start working on transparency and confidence-building measures, ways of building trust and improving mutual understanding, so that perhaps we can find in future some common solution on those more contested issues that persist.

The final challenge is that things in space are just moving so quickly. There is a lot of innovation, a lot of new assets and constellations going up on orbit, and a diversification and proliferation of new activities in space and enabled by space. Active debris removal, space-based manufacturing, any of those sorts of emerging use cases that once seemed like science fiction could soon become real. They all introduce new complexities and new sources for potential friction, misunderstanding or conflict. But I think there is genuine scope to make tangible progress if, and it is a big “if”, states can focus on those behaviours and those effects, work the problem collectively, and then find other means like deterrence or crisis communication channels to deal with those issues where universal agreement remains out of reach.