You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. AI is making phishing attacks faster, more convincing, and harder for people to spot, and traditional security awareness and phishing training weren't designed for this level of attack. Hawkshunt helps security teams prepare employees for the attacks they face every day with personalized phishing training that adapts to each employee and reduces risky behavior over time. For IT and security leaders looking to strengthen their human layer of defense without adding more manual work, visit hawkshunt.com slash cyberwire to learn more. That's h-o-x-h-u-n-t dot com slash cyberwire. 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 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 couple decades has dramatically reduced that international reliance. We're going to leave Strait of Hormuz out of that entirely. Just for people. You know, theoretically, it's all conceptual. I'm going to be that yes-butt person this whole show. On paper, we're good. On paper. Welcome. I'm Maria Varmazis, 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. 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 Caveat, 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. 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. 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 pause at 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 just so you can brag a bit. Yeah, so I, well, 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 subnode 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 got to understand modern politics. You have to understand history. And that has culminated into this passion about not just, you know, 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? And I think when you look at space, 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, oh, we're not really as, 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 my job here will be to provide like the wet blanket perspective of like, oh, it's not going as well as we think or it's going really great. I don't know. Either 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 and 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 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 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 the services and websites in 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? 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 say Canada for whatever the website is right Now you have now involved three different countries with three vastly different 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 in terms of general protections on data. But the questions of who owns that data, is it Canada because it's stored there physically? Is it the website that maybe is owned and operated and headquartered within the UK? Or is it the individual citizen? Who is 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, okay, we're going to try and cooperate on this and figure this out. So no one's really taking an outwardly hostile approach, especially between allies. Like, you know, the US and the EU have generally been more favorable in terms of like kind of negotiating these things out. Up until now anyway. Yeah, maybe not now. Actually, 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 what the who owns this and what has access to and being very upfront about that and the disgusting terms and services that no one ever wants to read especially the legal teams are always very busy like the lawyers love this uh exactly keep some employees yeah they make a ton of money off of it um and you know you get into the you know 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 hosting platforms across the entire globe, right? But they're all headquartered in the US. 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 and make sure that we are abiding by? And all of that is kind of the non-space stuff, 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 about data sovereignty. 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. Let's just say it, the U.S. becoming increasingly hostile to our allies. I mean, there's no other way to put it. But 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 our listeners in the UK 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, they just chalk it up to that. That we're dumb. It's true. 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 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, 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 UKSA 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 partners with other countries. And now there's more of a sense of we need to stand on our own. The time is now. 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? Yeah, great questions. Yep. So I think when you break down, we'll keep it on the Euro front for now because I think when you expand it to Asia, et cetera, 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 it a wake-up call because to your point, this call has 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 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. And the U.S. has changed its approach and over the past couple decades has dramatically reduced that international reliance. We're going to leave Strait of Hormuz out of that entirely. Just for people. Yeah, you know, theoretically, it's all conceptual. I'm going to be that yes, but Percy's whole show. 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. Now, this hasn'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, right? With missile warning detection systems, commercial satellites for like let say GPS in our previous conversations et cetera It no longer a select few industries there It is every year becoming a more and more involved space for a pun not intended But I think with that, Europe has sat there and said, 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 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. 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 it's worth mentioning specifically in the context of space um i mean how much russia's invasion of ukraine has really uh accelerated this conversation i i don't think can be overstated. And when we talk about, you know, U.S. influence in this direction, I mean, to get super specific, 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, 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, you know, 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 where it's like, yeah, it's out more, it's out more. No, this one keeps moving up because they know you cannot be at the mercy of what some random person in another country decides for something that's critical. Yeah. 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 a ever-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 sat 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 has not been passed, but is very clearly, regardless of what state 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. This isn't something we can wait on. And I think, you know, for the EU Space Act, they proposed 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. The second thing, resiliency. They want to make sure that their cybersecurity 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 viasat happened not just in an isolated area but across the entire eu uh and yeah that's the 2022 viasat uh hack yep yes yep and yeah like that sitting there going that we can't 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 and then lastly sustainability And this is to that long-term conversation saying, we don't just need to be independent now, but how do we remain independent for 10, 15, 20 years? How do we get us to the point where, great, we don't just have a Starling for today, but we have a Starling 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 U.K., saying 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. Right. And nobody wants to be in that position if they can help it. Yeah. Exactly. Those three pillars are really fascinating because I feel like from a space current events nerd, I can – sort of as you were doing, I can point to a specific thing that sort of was the spur for each of those pillars. And for the first one that you mentioned about access to space, that one is Arian space in a nutshell right there. And what I mean by that is ensuring European access to space from 20, I think, July 2023 to July 2024, Europe did not have their own sovereign launcher available. So for an entire year, Arian space's Arian six rocket was behind schedule and the Arian five 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 if we're still thinking about. Yeah, it is 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, that they're delivering dozens of satellites within just one launch, right? Like it's not just, oh, we're putting one thing up per launch. We're putting up dozens, masses, amounts of air. So that has an impact. And we're not just taking it again, to 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 a year long delay for a space program, 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 delay causes a huge ripple effect of delays down the line I mean it really gums up the works of the the the sovereignty gap is also Europe does not launch from the European continent Their their spaceport 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 trying to build sovereign launch capabilities within the continent for at least for, you know, smaller launch. 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 out, you know, spaceports 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. 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 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. No. 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 don't live by data centers, let alone a rocket launch station. Exactly. And, you know, because rocket launches, aside from being noisy and polluting, as 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 you 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, I've interviewed a bunch of people who are trying to build spaceports like in the Azores. And there's people trying to build spaceports 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, oh, what do we get from it? And they're like, oh, nothing much, you know, maybe some jobs. There's like, you know, 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, OK, cool. Why do you have to do that here? Why can't you go build that somewhere else? Yeah, it's a really hard sell. 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 awesome, 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 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— 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 and 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, 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 think about like Artemis 2. Yeah, it's the culture in Artemis 2, like moon joy and the viral videos of all the astronauts being like adorable around the moon. 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 U.K. 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 that. Everything starts with public support. And if you don't have that, 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-minus Space Cyber Briefing brought to you by N2K Cyber Wire. 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 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 thecyberwire.com slash newsletters. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space at n2k.com. We are proud that N2K Cyber Wire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K helps cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at n2k.com. Thank you for listening to T-Minus. I am your host, Maria Varmazis, and the show is produced by Ethan Cook and Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben with content strategy by Mayan Plaut. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. See you next week. Thank you. team. We'll see you there.
