NATO Puts Space Situational Awareness In The Spotlight

More than half of the organization’s 32 member nations recently signed onto a new program dubbed Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) in an effort to improve the collection, dissemination and distribution of the reams of space situational awareness data gathered by national and commercial space systems.

• New effort draws on priorities in NATO’s space strategy
• Ukraine war is a “catalyst” for the space-based data collection push

First announced in 2023 and kick-started by seed money from Luxembourg, the APSS is now 19 members strong. Defense ministers from 17 nations signed a memorandum of understanding on July 9 to invest the equivalent of $1 billion into the program during the annual NATO Summit in Washington, joined by NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana and NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) General Manager Ludwig Decamps.

The NCIA, the alliance’s technology and cyberhub, will now establish and manage an APSS program office with the Allied Command Operations (ACO) unit, says Laryssa Patten, the agency’s head of space technology adoption and resilience. The NCIA will be responsible for the technical elements, while the ACO, which oversees the planning and execution of all NATO military operations, will be responsible for the operational element.

Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine acted as a “catalyst” for the APSS program, Patten tells Aviation Week. In the two years since, governments around the world have observed the war in real time—thanks to a plethora of remote sensing systems in orbit—and they have absorbed how Ukraine in particular has taken advantage of space-based communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets from U.S. and European commercial providers since the very start.

In the war, “space has emerged both as an arena of intensifying interstate competition and as a domain where nonstate actors, including private companies and [nongovernmental organizations], play an increasingly hands-on role in shaping conflict dynamics and outcomes,” states a March Centre for Emerging Technology and Security report.

NATO adopted a space strategy in 2019 when the alliance officially recognized space as a new operating domain. That strategy, made public in 2022, identified six capability areas for alliance focus: space situational awareness; ISR; space-based monitoring of Earth-based domains; position, navigation and timing; satellite communications; and shared early warning assets.

The APSS is intended to result in a sensor- and solution-agnostic virtual constellation called Aquila. The NCIA wants the APSS to achieve initial operational capability by January 2026, Patten says. The team has begun processing the first of many commercial space imagery contracts and expects to begin receiving data in the coming weeks. NATO has completed technical tests for the initial architecture and system that will ensure the data collected can be transmitted and discovered. The ACO’s nascent space-based ISR cell achieved initial operational capability in June.

The 17 nations that have signed on to the APSS effort are: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Turkey and the U.S. Members can contribute with access to their own space-based capabilities, by supplying data collection and analysis tools or by providing funding for commercial data and imagery collection. The program remains open for additional NATO nations to join. 

“The more that join and contribute with ISR from space data, service or products, processing exploitation dissemination units or financial contributions, the stronger this program will be,” Patten says.

Luxembourg first provided €16.5 million ($18 million) in seed money for the APSS initiative to allow a program team composed of the NCIA, ACO and NATO headquarters staff to deliver nine projects between January 2023 and December 2025. Those projects aim to make national and commercial data discoverable and retrievable within existing NATO systems and to support any changes to the ACO tasking and collection processes needed to accommodate data and service from space, Patten says.

Once the APSS is operational, Luxembourg’s defense directorate plans to provide imagery from its LUXEOSys Earth-observation satellite, scheduled to launch in 2025, a government spokesperson says. The LUXEOSys satellite, built by OHB Italia, is equipped with a very-high-resolution panchromatic and multispectral camera and is to be placed at around 450 km (280 mi.) in a low polar orbit, orbiting the Earth 15 times a day.

Belgium intends to provide in-kind contributions to the APSS beginning in 2025, including electro-optical imagery from a variety of sources, national space imagery intelligence analysis products, and production exploitation and distribution services, according to the country’s defense ministry.

NATO’s two newest members, Sweden and Finland, plan to contribute primarily via data analysis capabilities, ministry officials tell Aviation Week. Helsinki intends to contribute a satellite imagery production system that allies can use to share satellite imagery data and provide analysis capabilities to NATO, while Stockholm initially aims to contribute via data analysis, although it may also provide financial contributions.

The German defense ministry plans to contribute remote sensing data derived from its fleets of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft, SAR-Lupe and SARah (Synthetic Aperture Radar altitude high), a ministry spokesperson said.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada will offer access to data from its Radarsat Constellation Mission and provide annual financial support, according to Canada’s Department of National Defense. The U.S. provides space-based data, products and services to support NATO operations, and under the APSS it will also equally share in supporting costs and providing subject matter expertise, a Pentagon spokesperson said.