CyberWire Daily - Europe's push for space sovereignty. [T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing]

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

As space becomes an increasingly critical part of modern infrastructure, governments are reevaluating decades of policy to ensure reliable, secure, and independent access to the systems they are incre...asingly relying on. In this week’s episode, host Maria Varmazis sits down with producer Ethan Cook⁠ to explore Europe's evolving space strategy and how it is increasingly prioritizing space sovereignty. During the conversation, they examine the EU's proposed Space Act and how it aims to improve the region's space security, sustainability, and reliability for years to come.⁠⁠⁠ Key sources: EU Space Act. EU Space Strategy for Security and Defense. Like what you heard? Be sure to subscribe to our free Signals and Space Briefing⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, our Sunday newsletter covering the intersection of cybersecurity and space. Subscribe at: https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/signals-and-space Is there a topic or person you’d like to hear on our show? You can send your questions and feedback to space@n2k.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. You can also fill our our audience survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NJYCN2P T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing is a production of N2K CyberWire. N2K is your nexus for discovery and connection for people, technology, and ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at n2k.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:26 why, especially when it's a mission critical thing. The U.S. learned this in the, you know, in the 70s with OPEC, right? Maybe relying on oil for another country when our country requires it is not the best thing in the world. And the U.S. has changed its approach and over the past, you know, a couple of decades has dramatically reduced that international reliance. We're going to leave straight of her moves out of that entirely, just for people. Yeah, you know, theoretically.
Starting point is 00:01:54 It's all, it's all a piece out for you. I'm going to be that yes-butt, Percy's whole show. On paper, we're good. On paper. Welcome, I'm Maria Varmazas, and you're listening to T-minus space cyber briefing. In this show, we examine the evolution of cybersecurity in the global and orbital infrastructure that powers protects and connects our lives. Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining me.
Starting point is 00:02:43 In today's show, I'm talking to T-Minus producer Ethan Cook about space sovereignty. It's a phrase being bandied about quite a bit lately, but what exactly does it mean? Well, who better to dive into the broad-ranging details of it all than Ethan, who not only lives and breathes geopolitics, but in addition to being one of our producers here at T-minus, he's also a producer on one of our sister shows here at N2K called Kaviott.
Starting point is 00:03:07 which is all about cybersecurity, law, and policy. So this space sovereignty chat gets into lots of geopolitics, the context of current events, as well as parallels to data sovereignty, cross-border issues of data ownership. Oh, and for some good measure, what's cooking in the EU Space Act's pillars of safety, resiliency, and sustainability? Oh, yeah, and this is just the first half of our chat. We'll share the second half with you in next week's episode. There's just that much to discuss.
Starting point is 00:03:37 Well, in the meantime, you ready? Let's go. All right, it is time now for my favorite kind of conversation, and that's when I get to chat with producer Ethan Cook. Hello, Ethan. Hey, how you doing? I'm excellent now that we get to talk today. Wonderful. Yeah, and Ethan, we're going to be chatting today about something that is so in your wheelhouse. I cannot wait to get your thoughts.
Starting point is 00:04:00 Yeah, it's near and dear to my heart. Oh, I know. It's all geopolitics, and this is like this is your world. So I'm just going to, I'm going to posit the topic, but then I want you to tell me a bit about your area of expertise just so we can establish this because I think our audience should know. So we're going to be talking about space sovereignty, specifically in the context of Europe. That's like our focus area for today. But because this is such a geopolitical conversation, and Ethan, you are my geopolitics guy. Tell me a bit about your area of expertise here, just so you can brag a bit. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:32 So while I'm not traditionally a, you know, a space geopolitics person, I think, you know, the conversations around geopolitics and politics in general have always been something that I've been fascinated by. And as I've gotten into the space, learning the geopolitics behind this as a subnote is like fascinating. Good. But the, you know, I went to school. My undergraduate degree was in political science, and I have always been focused on international relations within that as well. Also in history, and I think, you know, to understand history, you get out, to understand modern politics, you have to understand history. And the, that is culminated to this passion about not just, you know,
Starting point is 00:05:13 what's going on in the world, because I don't really think that matters too much, but the bigger question is why it's going on in the world and what's driving the forces, who's the actors behind it, and not just like what they're doing, but, you know, what is the long-term five-year plan with this? Or what in the past five years has caused this policy to emerge?
Starting point is 00:05:33 And I think when you look at spacing, especially when you look at the sovereignty conversation that's going on, you can see very, very clear lines here outside of the space sector, but tangentially related that have driven this and have driven this, mentality of kind of like an oak we're not really as
Starting point is 00:05:52 you know monolithic as a country in this conversation as we really want to be. Yeah, well said. Yeah, and so yeah, Ethan, let's get into that because I'm coming at this as the like space current events nerd and also just overall space nerd. So I have a feeling
Starting point is 00:06:08 my job here will be to provide like the wet blanket perspective of like, uh, it's not going as well as we think or it's going really great. I don't know. one. But let's talk about, I guess, the broader context before we dive into the space angle, I feel like, especially given our world in the world of the cyber wire, we got to start with data sovereignty and that conversation with Europe. So, I mean, how do you even want to approach that? I mean, that is a massive, massive show on its own. Yeah, that's, I mean, to get into the
Starting point is 00:06:35 weeds of that would be, it would take episodes. But I think when, you know, you think of sovereignty as even taking the data part out of it, you know, you're thinking of a country's ability to make decisions and enforce those decisions without another country kind of interfering with those things, right? So if the EU says, hey, we want to implement this new data security law, maybe the GDPR, for example, they have the right to do that. And no other country can really stop them
Starting point is 00:06:58 or prevent them from enforcing it within their territories. So when we bring that kind of logic to data, it gets a little messy because outside of just people being able to access services and websites and other countries, which they're collecting data, And that's now involving a foreign citizen of another country. You also get into conversations regarding data storage, right? Let's go into, okay, I'm a California resident, right?
Starting point is 00:07:27 I live, you know, let's say I live in San Fran. California, really strict data security laws for the U.S., and I access a website that's based in, I don't know, Britain, right? Britain, I go to them and they have a whole different host of laws. but that data is now hosted and stored in, let's say, Canada, for whatever the website is, right? Now you now involve three different countries with three vastly different,
Starting point is 00:07:53 maybe with some similarities, but data protection laws that all require different things. And that's just like, that's a clean example, right? Because now you're getting into the conversation of, they all sort of agree with each other with, in terms of general protections on data. But the questions of who owns that data, Is it Canada because it's stored there physically?
Starting point is 00:08:14 Is it the website that maybe is owned and operated and headquartered within the UK? Or is it the individual citizen who was that person who accessed it? And for years, there have been almost like this, I want to call it no man's land of data law, where there has been agreements and nudge, nudge, wink, wink agreements between different countries, kind of saying, like, oh, we're going to try and cooperate on this and figure this out. No one's really taking an outwardly hostile approach, especially between allies, like, you know, the U.S. and the EU have generally been more favorable in terms of like kind of negotiating these things out. But it kind of has created. Yeah, maybe not now.
Starting point is 00:08:53 Actually, you're, yeah. The, you get into this, you know, really complicated legal gray zone of who owns what, who has the right to enforce what. And for the most part, we've gone through this through bilateral agreements. companies taking proactive stances, probably for their own protection, saying, okay, this is how we define who owns this and what has access to and being very upfront about that and the disgusting terms and services that no one never wants to read. So I say the legal teams are always very busy.
Starting point is 00:09:24 Like the lawyers love this. Exactly. Keep some employees. Yeah, they make a ton of money off of it. And, you know, you get into that kind of conversational point. And it extends far beyond just like website hosting. Let's talk about cloud infrastructure, right? You have AWS or, you know, Azure or Google Cloud, which have data centers and
Starting point is 00:09:45 hosting platforms across the entire globe, right? But they're all headquartered in the U.S. So what happens in that, right? And that was, you know, they have to make individual agreements within a country or, you know, to safeguard or say like, okay, Japan, we're willing to host a data center here or a cloud service hosting platform here. What are the legal regulations that we have to, you know, kind of hop through? through and make sure that we are abiding by. And all of that is kind of the non-space stuff,
Starting point is 00:10:14 which is just scratching the very surface of it. But it is remarkably parallel, not just in terms of how complex it is, but I mean, even if we're talking macro, the flavor of it all, I mean, that is not a technical term. But if you're just like really zooming out on this in terms of its complexity, we're talking about the gentleman's agreements in terms of how people are cooperating with each other or the legal agreements. And, you know, who owns what, what is in whose domain? What about where things are resting versus where things are in transit? I mean, if we're going to be talking about space sovereignty, it would be silly to not talk
Starting point is 00:10:52 about data sovereignty because they are. You can't have the conversation without the other. It's true. It's true. So now that we've sort of chatted a bit about, you know, we've laid the foundation for data sovereignty is very complex. Europe especially, but certainly not only Europe, has a huge, renewed emphasis on data sovereignty because of many reasons recently in the last few years.
Starting point is 00:11:15 Let's just say it, the U.S. becoming increasingly hostile to our allies. I mean, there's no other way to put it. There is an urgency to data sovereignty, especially within European nations. And I'm not talking just the EU. I'm talking Europe and key partners as well as the UK, just sort of generally what we in the United States tend to call Europe for better or for worse. It's all the same, right? Right, and I know, and I know our listeners in the UK
Starting point is 00:11:43 are not appreciating that, but I'm just admitting our ignorance on that one. So let's say Europe and the UK. We're American, right? You know, we, we, they just chalk it up to that. That we're dumb. It's true. So, so when we talk about space sovereignty, it is a largely parallel conversation. To me, it's the renewed emphasis on moving away from U.S. space hegemony.
Starting point is 00:12:05 because let's be real. The U.S. has really owned a lot of space access for a long time. And especially when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe had been using a lot of Russian space capabilities. They'd been launching a lot of stuff with Soyuz. That went away immediately, understandably. And so between Russia being out of the picture for European space access and the United States is just not as reliable a partner anymore,
Starting point is 00:12:34 the EU and the UK are looking to grow. They're already very capable, let me be clear, very capable homegrown industries. These two organizations, both the UK Space Agency or UK.S.A and the European Space Agency, extraordinarily capable, humongous industries within both areas that have been supporting these for decades. So it's not like these are brand new. But there maybe was a sense of we are working as part. with other countries. And now there's more of a sense of we need to stand on our own. The time is now.
Starting point is 00:13:11 There's been sort of calls for this for ages, but maybe there wasn't the same urgency that there is today. What are the questions that space sovereignty is trying to address here, especially within the context of UK and European space sovereignty? I mean... Yeah, great questions. Yep. So I think when you break down, we'll keep it on the euro for. front for now. Because I think when you expand it to Asia, etc., you know, there's a whole host of different drivers. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about why Europe has kind of had this, I don't want to call to a wake-up call, because to your point, this calls have
Starting point is 00:13:47 been there for a while. But I think maybe facing of reality is kind of a better word that maybe they're like, oh, this is something that's a 10-year plan. And they realize, oh, crap, it's more like a three-year plan. Yep, yep. Where no one ever wants to say as a country that we're dependent on another country for X or Y, especially when it's a mission-critical thing. The U.S. learned this in the, you know, in the 70s with OPEC, right? But when, oh, maybe relying on oil for another country, when our country requires it is not the best thing in the world.
Starting point is 00:14:18 And the U.S. has changed its approach, and over the past, you know, a couple of decades, has dramatically reduced that international reliance. We're going to leave straight of Hormuz out of that entirely, just for people. Yeah, you know, see, theoretically. It's all conceptual. I'm going to be that yes-butt person's whole show.
Starting point is 00:14:39 On paper we're good. On paper. But so when you, I think for Europe it applies the same way, right? They, I think over the past 20 years, it's fair to say that space has become increasingly year-over-year, not this isn't something that 20 years ago we went, oh, crap, this is something we need to focus on, but this is now a now kind of conversation. The 20 years ago, we had, and year-over-year, we've begun. to sit there and say, okay, space is becoming a really viable commercial and national security enterprise,
Starting point is 00:15:10 right, with missile warning detection systems, commercial satellites for, like, let's say, GPS in our previous conversations, et cetera. There's, it's, it's no longer a select few industries there. It is every year becoming a more and more involved space for a pun intended, not let for a pun not intended. But I think with that, Europe has sat there and said, okay, Okay, we can rely on the U.S. for support here to help us launch satellites, to help us launch infrastructure, for technology, for defense systems, et cetera. And I think with the kind of U.S.'s pivot over the past couple years to a more, you know, isolationist mentality, more, you know, U.S. first mentality that has woken Europe up to this
Starting point is 00:15:58 kind of a conversation that maybe the U.S. is not the person we can rely on anymore. And with that, the pivot has been forced. And they have very rapidly doubled down into this pivot. Ah, yes, the pivot. Much like trying to get a sofa around a tight corner, it's what you've got to do. Speaking of things we must do, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.
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Starting point is 00:18:53 Welcome back. Before the break, producer Ethan Cook and I were discussing some of the driving forces behind Europe's new push for space sovereignty. Let's get back into that now. Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning specifically in the context of space. I mean, how much Russia's invasion of Ukraine has really accelerated this conversation. I don't think it can be overstated. And when we talk about, you know, U.S. influence in this direction, I mean, to get super specific,
Starting point is 00:19:31 I mean, the thing that I think of is, frankly, Elon Musk making decisions on his own about whether or not to open or close access to Starlink over Ukraine, either for the beginning of the war for Ukrainian soldiers and then later for Russian soldiers and just this single person essentially putting his thumb on the scale. And Europe going, wait a second, if one person in another country can decide that, and this is a service that we are, you know, that Ukraine, and frankly everybody is very dependent on, and that would be Starlink. That is a very terrifyingly vulnerable position to be in. And I don't think anything lit a fire under Europe's bum as much as this. Yeah. And especially for development of their own sovereign satellite,
Starting point is 00:20:18 military communication capabilities for the Iris Squared project. I mean, that timeline for Iris Squared, which is sort of in the vernacular thought of as the European answer, the European-owned answer to Starlink, their timeline keeps moving up a year every time they talk about it, which is like the opposite of what most space programs do, or it's like, yeah, it's out more, it's out more. This one keeps moving out because they know you cannot be at the mercy
Starting point is 00:20:45 of what some random person in another country decides is for something that's critical. And I think that was what drove the initial conversations of space sovereignty, especially within Europe, this mentality of, you know, we are not nearly as independent on this for every, increasing critical infrastructure sector that we would really like to be. And it was a rude awakening for many factors that just set them and they set back and went, okay, we need to start investing, which is why we have the emergence of not just European projects for launching, but I think with the emphasis on the EU Space Act. And core legislation that some of which has and some of which
Starting point is 00:21:24 has not been passed, but is very clearly, regardless of whether what stated it is in, is a reaction to the EU and the UK saying we cannot rely on what we've been relying on for 10 years. We have to pivot now. Like this isn't something we can wait on. I think for the EU Space Act, they propose three key pillars. And right away they say the first thing that's driving them is safety, right? They want to have the ability to mitigate space disasters. They want to have the ability to preserve Europe's access to uninterrupted space.
Starting point is 00:21:56 The second thing, resiliency. They want to make sure that their. cyber security capabilities are a priority, that European space infrastructure, and I think this was probably a result of the Ukraine war, they walked away and said, oh, what would happen if Vyassat happened not just in an isolated area, but across the entire EU? Yeah, that's the 2022 Vyazat hack. Yep, yes, yep. And yet, like that sitting there going, that, we can't, where security is not where it should be right now and we're more vulnerable than we really want to be. And that was a rude awakening.
Starting point is 00:22:29 And then lastly, sustainability, and this is to that long-term conversation, saying we, how do we, we don't just need to be, you know, independent now. But how do we remain independent for 10, 15, 20 years? How do we get us to the point where, great, we have a, we don't just have a Starlink for today, but we have a Starlink for the next 20 years. We're in a position where we don't have to rely on whoever the actor is, whether it's a U.S. actor, a Russian actor, a Chinese actor, or in the EU space, like saying, even the UK, saying, you know, while they're both European, they are different nations. They are different governments saying that we don't have to rely on one another if we don't want to. It's one thing to say this is a great deal for the short term. Let's take it. And another to say we have no other choice but to take this deal.
Starting point is 00:23:11 Right. And nobody wants to be in that position if they can help it. Yeah. Exactly. And those three pillars are really fascinating because I feel like from a space current events nerd, I can sort of as you are doing, I can point to a specific thing that sort of was the spur for each of those pillars. For the first one that you mentioned about access to space, that one is Aryan space in a nutshell right there.
Starting point is 00:23:36 And what I mean by that is ensuring European access to space, from July 23 to July 2024, Europe did not have their own sovereign launcher available. So for an entire year, Aryan spaces, Aryan 6 rocket was behind schedule, and the Aryan 5 had been retired. For an entire year, Europe was like, we don't have our own rocket to launch things. And I think for some people who maybe have not updated their mental paradigm about how often we are as a human race are launching things to space, one year might not sound like a lot.
Starting point is 00:24:11 It's a lot. It's a lot. Like, if you're still thinking like it's the 90s or early 2000s and we're using shuttles, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot. But a year is a humongous gap nowadays when we've got SpaceX's Falcon 9 doing over 100 launches a year. I mean, a year long. And they're delivering dozens of satellites within just one long. right like it's it's not just oh we're putting one thing up per launch we're putting up dozens masses amounts there so that yep has an impact and we're not just taking it again to
Starting point is 00:24:38 your point we're not just taking off one we're taking off a hundred times that by dozens we're losing hundreds of satellites every year yeah and and one and a year long delay for a space program even if you were if even if say you are thinking about you know exquisite satellites like a one-off which again is not generally what's happening a one-year delay is it causes a huge ripple effect of delays down the line. I mean, it is just, it is, it really gums up the works. So part of the, the sovereignty gap is also, Europe does not launch from the European continent. Their, their space port is in French Guiana, which is across the Atlantic Ocean from the European continent. So that is, I mean, that is the legacy of colonialism right there, frankly. But Europe is
Starting point is 00:25:23 trying to build sovereign launch capabilities within the continent for, at least for, at least for, smaller launch that they're not going to, I don't think they're going to be able to launch like medium to heavy lift from Europe, who knows, but at least for smaller launch, for responsive space missions, they are trying to build, build out,
Starting point is 00:25:40 you know, space ports and getting that capability really within, you know, continental European soil, but they still don't really have that. And the same goes for the UK. They've had, they had horizontal launch from this place called spaceport Cornwall,
Starting point is 00:25:53 but vertical launch, which is sort of the more classic, like rocket go up. They don't really have that. And that's a big problem. And a lot of the issues that, you know, both the governments are running into, and actually we run into this pretty much anywhere with spaceports is people don't want to live near a spaceport.
Starting point is 00:26:12 No. And I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't either. I mean, I live in New England and there was talk about putting a spaceport in Maine, and that did not go over very well. So, you know, it's very hard to find places. People only live by data centers, let alone a rocket launch station. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:26:30 And, you know, because rocket launches, aside from being noisy and polluting, as clean as they, cleaner as they are compared to how they used to be in, like, the 60s, I mean, they can go wrong. We're talking about a missile. So you need a lot of empty space. So, you know, it's, you have to build these things nowadays, usually in very remote places. And then, of course, you get issues with the infrastructure that's needed to support that. And you need people who are going to be. there to support it. It's a very difficult problem. A very difficult problem. You cannot, so, I mean,
Starting point is 00:27:02 I've interviewed a bunch of people who are trying to build spaceports like in the Azores and there's people trying to build space ports in remote areas of Scotland. And, you know, progress is being made, but almost always a big part of the issue is, aside from the physical logistics of it, is sort of the political will and local pushback. Well, and I think, you know, you look at space from a localization perspective. And when if you're an average person who doesn't really know about space or isn't involved in that, being told that you're going to have a massive project be built in the area that's going to create a ton of noise and some pollution and could explode at any time, you know, you're not going to sell it to the average person, especially when you tell them,
Starting point is 00:27:41 oh, what do we get from it? And they're like, oh, nothing much, you know, maybe some jobs and jobs. There's like, you know, yeah, that's about it, right? Oh, like, oh, they're going to say, oh, we're securing the missile defense system for the nation. Like, okay, cool, why do you have to do that here? Why can you go build that somewhere else? Yeah, it's a super hard sell. And I think even when we talk about this, again, because we're talking geopolitics, there's an element of culture here that comes into play. And in the U.S., we've been really great at selling our space program. I mean, we've done some amazing things. NASA's the best. I don't think anybody's ever going to argue with that. And to be very cynical, to use a cynical word, we've had a lot of really
Starting point is 00:28:20 great propaganda about our space program. And I hate using it. that way. But I mean, it's truly like an academic way of talking about propaganda. We have propagandized space in the United States really well to the point that most Americans are... Why we won the space race. Right. I mean, most Americans, even if they don't really care about space stuff, most Americans have like a generally-ish positive view of it. I mean, when the latest telescope came out on all the newest images were coming out of space, it was like a whole thing for like a week within the U.S. Like, everyone's like, oh, did you see the latest space? Like, people who have never talked about space before that I've met are like,
Starting point is 00:28:52 oh my gosh, did you see the star? I'm like, what? Yeah. You know, what are we talking about here, right? But that's just, it's a culture. Yeah, it's the culture. And Artemis II, like, moon joy and the viral videos of all the astronauts being, like, adorable around the moon.
Starting point is 00:29:07 I mean, that was global to some degree. But, I mean, there was, in the U.S., this was not a hard sell. And I would say in Canada, too. Canada's, like, you know, they're a buddy. We still love you, Canada. I hope you love us. Not so much right now. But, I mean, culturally, I mean, ESA and the,
Starting point is 00:29:22 and the UK Space Agency doing amazing work. But culturally, it is a much, much harder sell in Europe. People are kind of like, yeah, it's not really our thing. So you have to get a lot. You have to get public support for this kind of thing before you can get. Everything starts with public support. And if you don't have that,
Starting point is 00:29:39 if people aren't jazzed about it, if they don't understand why this stuff matters, you're not going to get funding. And then everything just stops. And that's T-Mina Space Cyber Briefing, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. If you like what you heard today, Do not miss next week's episode where we'll share the second half of our space sovereignty chat,
Starting point is 00:30:07 where we're talking challenges on the horizon and externalities. Where does India fit in all this? And what about NATO? Yeah, that's next week. And dare I say, you will also enjoy our newsletter, signals and space. You will get research and notes pulled together by Ethan Cook and me, along with this week's top space cyber news stories. Make sure to subscribe by visiting the CyberWymyWy.
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