The Silent Sentinel: How Space Domain Awareness is Supporting Modern Conflicts
By Kerri Mertz
As conflicts on Earth become increasingly reliant on assets in orbit, the importance of space as a contested military domain has never been clearer. The war in Ukraine has underscored a pivotal shift: space is no longer a backdrop to terrestrial operations—it is a frontline in its own right.
At Spaceflux, we specialise in precision optical tracking of satellites and debris from low-Earth to beyond GEO. Our mission is to ensure space remains transparent and secure for defence and strategic users. In today’s dynamic threat landscape, Space Domain Awareness (SDA) has become indispensable to military operations, decision-making, and deterrence. The Ukraine conflict offers real-world insights into how SDA is a pivotal capability in supporting 21st-century conflicts.
From Orbit to the Battlefield: SDA in Action
SDA encompasses the ability to detect, track, and characterise objects in space—ranging from operational satellites to space debris. It includes monitoring satellite manoeuvres, predicting conjunctions, understanding space weather effects, and identifying hostile behaviour such as jamming or co-orbital threats. For modern militaries, SDA is not just about space safety—it’s about strategic advantage.
The Ukraine conflict offers a glimpse into the central role of space-enabled capabilities:
- Satellite communications have become a lifeline for Ukrainian forces. The deployment of commercial constellations like Starlink has demonstrated how quickly responsive SDA is needed to ensure satellite availability, orbital awareness, and electromagnetic spectrum security in a war zone.
- Russian counterspace threats, both kinetic and non-kinetic, have highlighted the value of SDA for anticipating potential attacks on space infrastructure. Early warnings about manoeuvres or debris from ASAT (anti-satellite) testing can inform rapid mitigation steps and risk management.
- Tactical awareness of orbital dynamics, such as tracking when adversarial reconnaissance satellites pass over troop positions or logistics nodes, is now essential. SDA feeds into operational planning, signal camouflage, and timing of key movements on the ground.
Operational Impact: SDA as a Force Multiplier
SDA enhances operational effectiveness in several key ways:
- Strategic planning: Knowing when a surveillance satellite is overhead allows commanders to adapt manoeuvres and limit exposure. SDA becomes part of the tactical playbook.
- Threat detection: Proximity operations—where foreign satellites approach friendly assets—can signal espionage or interference. SDA gives early alerts to inform posture and escalation protocols.
- Resilience and redundancy: In a conflict where communication nodes are targeted, having real-time awareness of satellite health and alternatives is vital for command continuity.
- Attribution and accountability: When interference or debris events occur, SDA supports attribution. This capability underpins diplomatic and strategic responses in multi-domain operations.
Spaceflux’s Role in Military SDA
Spaceflux is expanding our global network of autonomous optical sensors, capable of delivering high-cadence tracking and rapid object identification. Our systems are designed to support military and allied partners with:
- Persistent tracking of high-value space assets and adversarial systems.
- Rapid alerting of uncoordinated manoeuvres or orbit proximity violations.
- Conjunction analysis with a focus on military satellites in congested orbital regimes.
- Custom analytics to integrate orbital insights into battlefield command and control platforms.
Our agility and independence as a commercial provider allow us to supplement and enhance national SDA frameworks, delivering high-resolution data with low latency and high reliability.
The Path Forward
The Ukraine conflict has shown that space is a domain of first-order importance in military strategy. As commercial and military systems increasingly share the same orbits, the need for high-fidelity, independent SDA has never been greater.
In the next phase of strategic planning and force design, policy-makers and military leaders must consider SDA not just as an intelligence function, but as a core enabler of deterrence, operational security, and decision dominance.
At Spaceflux, we are committed to being a trusted partner in this effort—providing the clarity, coverage, and confidence needed to navigate an increasingly contested orbital environment.
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