Daniel Hilgert, head of the Space Section Defence Industry, Innovation and Armaments Division
NATO. Photo: Access Intelligence

As space becomes a domain of warfare, democracies across the globe will increasingly rely on commercial satellite operators and private sector space companies to wage it, a senior NATO official told last week’s CyberSat conference.

“Eventually we want to see commercial partners embedded — real bodies, real company representatives — working and fighting side by side with our space operators,” said Daniel Hilgert, the senior space coordinator within the Defence Industry, Innovation and Armaments Division (D2IA) at NATO headquarters.

In times of conflict, commercial space providers will find themselves on the front lines anyway, whether they liked it or not, so they might as well get ready now, Hilbert told the audience of space industry executives.

“This will be the reality for the crisis and the conflict anyway. So I think it should be normalized, this modus operandi, in peacetime,” he said.

NATO is setting up a commercial integration cell at the alliance’s new Space Operations Center (SOC) at Ramstein U.S. Air Force Base in southwestern Germany, to facilitate the integration of commercial operators into alliance space operations, Hilbert said, predicting it will be a powerful hub.

The SOC is NATO’s “crown jewel for our space operations,” he said, fusing space situational awareness data from multiple sources “into a common operating picture.”

“We all know that no single nation or single organization can see the entire space environment alone,” he said.

Hilbert promised a new threat information sharing mechanism for unclassified data sharing with industry partners that sounded like it’s modeled on the U.S. Space Systems Command Orbital Watch.

The German government has put its shoulder behind the effort to secure its national space capabilities, Florian Göhle, a technical officer with Berlin’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), told a different session.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius recently announced an unprecedented $41 billion for space security over the next five years, warning: “Our Achilles’ heel lies in space.” He revealed how Russian satellites had stalked two Intelsat satellites used by the German military.

Global resources like GPS and Galileo are being jammed and there are non-kinetic attacks against Earth Observation satellites, Göhle said, “We need secure systems. … We will invest a lot of money in military space projects.”

The spending aims to secure space infrastructure for broader international and scientific use, he added, “Space security needs to be international, in our opinion, because in space you don’t have borders.”

The era of space as a domain of conflict is upon us today, Hilbert emphasized. Russia’s increasingly brazen hybrid warfare efforts already extended into space: “Every day satellites are being jammed. … So it’s not just the drones, it’s not just the jets that are violating our airspace, but we also have them in space on a daily basis.”

Democracies have to leverage innovation to prepare for and deter conflict with autocracies, Hilbert said. “Our alliance is home to the world’s leading defense industrial suppliers. We have an industrial base that continues to innovate, that continues to push technological boundaries, we have to use those leaps for the greater good, for peace, for prosperity and democracy.”

But the cutting edge of space innovation might turn out to be a double-edged blade, according to Michael Bernat, cyber CTO of Israeli defense tech outfit Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

The development of inter-satellite communications should take security lessons from the experience of drone warfare, where sophisticated countermeasures were required to prevent imposters and spoofing. “Everything that we are seeing in the drone area will be in the space area,” Bernat said.

The supply chain has been so compromised, he added, that Rafael had invested heavily in building its own bespoke alternatives to open source or commercially developed hardware and software.

“By getting known components from out of the shelf, we are compromising the entire system,” Bernat said. “And so we started to engineer, and we are investing tons of money in order to have our own components that are not publicly used, in order to minimize the attack surface of our user.”

Many NATO member states are reliant on a single commercial provider, particularly for space-based imagery, Hilbert commented.

“It’s great that [NATO member] nations go out and contract more commercial services, but I think the focus on [on everybody using the same] individual single providers can really create some vulnerabilities and risks,” he said.

One space executive not authorized to speak to the media noted that setting up a commercial integration cell, like the one at the U.S. Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) at Vandenberg, California, is part of a pattern on the part of NATO: “They are following the lead of the U.S. Space Force.”

Indeed, Hilbert reported on progress with NATO’s Front Door, a concept explicitly borrowed from the U.S. Space Force — a single point of contact for potential contractors. NATO’s Front Door will offer “a unique platform that should make it easier for industry to connect to us, to the range of different NATO players in the NATO environment, but also with all the individual allies that have their own Front Doors,” Hilbert said.

“We will establish a new marketplace for space services to allow NATO and then eventually allies, to more rapidly procure commercial services,” he said. And the process would not just be a one-way procurement funnel.

“The Front Door will not just be a door for you to come into our organization, but we also want this to be a radar for us, for NATO, for the [member] nations, to basically help us understand what technologies are you developing, [and] understand where should we invest. We also want to use this to share threat [data]. So there’s a range of different things that we want to do with this Front Door.”

“We want to build a more coherent and effective relationship with the commercial space sector,” he added.

Front Door is proceeding at the speed of government, Hilbert said: “In every big bureaucracy you have a lot of different actors, and it’s sometimes challenging to push.” He promised the organization would launch in the first half of 2026.

For NATO, he said, Front Door will start with space, but it is a procurement approach the alliance plans to promote for all its military procurement. “We really want to use space as a laboratory to test how this works, … because we see similar challenges for non-traditional defense products in the cyber, the land and air and maritime domains,” said Hilbert.

The fundamental challenge in every domain is the length of the procurement cycle. “In the space sector, the pace of technology development is so rapid that we really don’t have the luxury of time to use those procurement and acquisition models from the Cold War times,” he said.

Although NATO member states have committed to a new baseline of 3.5% of GDP for core defense requirements, there is more to it than just throwing money at the problem. “Investing is one issue. You can open the cash boxes. But ensuring that our industries can absorb the influx of cash and deliver, that’s a completely different issue,” Hilbert said.

To help accelerate delivery timelines, NATO has worked with the French space agency CNES to establish a center of excellence in Toulouse.

“We want to see nations to harness the innovation that comes from the commercial but at the same time, I think we still need to adapt our mindsets, our processes and structures to this new reality,” he said.