Protecting satellites is not enough to keep the UK’s critical services running

Steve Knibbs is a Director at Vodafone Business, leading the company’s work delivering secure communications for government, critical national infrastructure and large organisations. Before joining Vodafone, Steve spent ten years serving as a telecommunications engineer in the British Army’s Royal Signals.

The Government’s UK Space Strategy sets out £7.8 billion of investment to 2030, including plans for a more resilient, integrated national satellite communications system. With the Autumn Budget now confirming full funding for the Defence Investment Plan, attention must turn to how Britain protects the critical infrastructure underpinning its defence and space capabilities.

The commitment reflects how central space has become to Britain’s national security, economy and public services. Satellite communications, navigation and other space-enabled services already support defence, emergency services, transport and financial markets. In fact, the Strategic Defence Review estimates that nearly 20% of UK GDP relies on satellite services, while disruption to GPS alone could cost the economy around £1 billion a day.

As our dependence on space grows, however, Britain needs to think differently about what exactly resilience means. Securing individual satellites, ground stations or networks is important, but the ultimate measure of resilience is whether the critical service they support can continue when part of that infrastructure is disrupted. That is the shift in thinking the new strategy now needs to support.

Protecting the service from orbit to end user

To understand why, it is worth looking at how these services actually work. A satellite does not deliver a critical service on its own. It relies on ground stations to receive and transmit data, and those ground stations rely on communications networks, cloud platforms and other digital infrastructure. From there, information still has to reach the people, platforms and systems that need it.

That creates a dependency chain from satellite to ground station to network to end user. Each component may perform a different role, but the service depends on all of them working together. A weakness at one point can affect the capability further down the line.

For defence, the stakes are even higher. Modern military operations increasingly depend on these services to move information quickly and securely between people, platforms and systems. A failure somewhere in that chain can therefore become an operational problem.

The question for resilience planning is not simply whether an individual asset remains secure, but whether the capability it supports remains available.

Designing for continuity

That does not mean greater integration should be treated as a risk in itself. In many cases, it can strengthen resilience. Satellite capability can extend connectivity into harder-to-reach areas and provide another route when terrestrial infrastructure is under pressure. But the value of that integration depends on the overall service being able to withstand disruption.

This is significant because an adversary will look for opportunities across the system. The weakest point may sit in orbit, at a ground station, within a communications network or with a third-party supplier. Protecting one component cannot compensate for an unaddressed vulnerability elsewhere.

For defence, continuity therefore needs to sit at the centre of resilience planning. Critical communications must be able to keep operating when part of the infrastructure is compromised, degraded or unavailable.

In practical terms, that starts with understanding the dependencies behind each service. Government and industry need to know which infrastructure a capability relies on, where single points of failure exist, how disruption could spread and what alternatives are available.

The same principle applies to recovery. Resilience is partly about preventing disruption, but it is also about limiting its impact and restoring capability quickly when an incident does occur.

In practice, that may mean combining technologies, suppliers and networks so that the loss of one element does not remove the capability altogether. The precise solution will differ between services, but the objective should remain consistent: maintaining the critical function under pressure.

Building service resilience into Britain’s space ambitions

This is where the new Space Strategy presents a real opportunity. We have the chance to embed that approach into the next generation of UK satellite communications from the outset.

As the Government develops a more integrated national system, resilience should be designed around the critical services Britain needs to sustain. That means looking across satellites, ground infrastructure, networks, suppliers and users together, and understanding how disruption in one part of the system could affect the overall capability.

Delivering that will require close cooperation between government and industry. No single organisation controls every element of a modern communications service. Satellite operators, telecoms providers, cloud companies, government departments and end users may each hold different parts of the picture.

Shared understanding is essential. Government and industry need to be clear on which services are most critical, what infrastructure those services depend on and how continuity will be maintained when disruption occurs. Building that understanding before a crisis is far easier than discovering the gaps during one.

For Britain’s growing space ambitions, the priority should therefore be clear. Investment in satellites and supporting infrastructure must be matched by an understanding of the services they enable and the dependencies that keep those services running.

Coverage and speed will remain important measures of connectivity. Security, control and continuity under pressure increasingly matter alongside them. As Britain becomes more dependent on space, resilience should ultimately be judged by whether the capabilities the country relies on are still there when they are needed most.