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Nations are seeking stronger control over their own communications architectures. But how to define what sovereign space means, and what it can do within a more geopolitically complex space infrastructure, is still an evolving discussion.

The answer to what defines “space sovereignty” remains somewhat blurry. For example, the U.S. government is considered to have complete control over its space framework — except for the amount of semiconductors, and other hardware and software that is imported from nations like Taiwan.

“Sovereignty for me is about how you control what you either procure or what you’re operating,” Benoit Deper, CEO and founder of Aerospacelab, said during a SATShow panel discussion on March 23.

Steve Mills, vice president, global government, Eutelsat Group, had a different interpretation. “I believe that the word is slightly changing,” he said. “Here we are in a world of multi-orbit, multi frequency communications. The commercial world is launching satellites that are serving a great purpose for our defense and our critical national infrastructures. Yes, sovereignty still does mean national security. It still means these big, robust systems, and we’re never going to get away from that. The word sovereign does mean different things to different people.”

Mills recounted a conversation he had with one of the leaders in Ukraine about what sovereignty meant in their digital environment. “He was offshoring data because he didn’t trust that leaving it in Ukraine was the best option for them,” Mills said. “So they were offshoring their sovereign data capability.”

John Reeves, vice president of Space and Mission systems for Viasat, agreed with Mills’ assessment about the changing nature of the word. “Different nations are going to have different interpretations in terms of what truly makes a capability sovereign,” Reeves said. “I think that the notion of sovereignty really comes back to, in large part, how the data is going to be managed, and how that’s going to be assured.”

When it comes to discussion about data on the network, denial of service is a huge consideration, Mills said. “It’s not just about securing the data on the network, choosing a public or a private network,” he said. “But also about who has the ability to deny that service.”

The changing landscape about what sovereignty means to different people is beginning to inform how manufacturers approach development, Deper said. “From our perspective as a manufacturer, we are adapting to that new business model. We’re more focused on sovereignty on the infrastructure side. People tend to be more flexible on sovereignty on the infrastructure side, and less flexible on sovereignty on the operations side.”

Deper added that domestic content is becoming a large part of sovereignty strategies. He’s seeing a trend in request for knowledge/technology transfer to help equip a nation with in-country capabilities.

To accomplish domestic content demand, instead of doing the whole satellite at their factory, Aerospacelab would pre-assemble it and “have kind of kit that we can then efficiently assemble in a certain country,” he said. “That’s definitely a trend that is growing.”

Another trend is ‘sovereignty by design,’ which Reeves said takes into account several elements. “You’re looking at the security of the data, the management of the data, the security of the infrastructure. And then you have to have people to operate these networks. You have to have some level of trust and assurance in terms of who the folks are that your government is likely to be contracting with to provide that type of support. That’s all part of the mix as you look at delivering these systems.”

As much in demand as these systems are for countries around the world, to build a reliable and resilient one is not possible for many of them. “It can be an eye-watering amount of money to get a global capable system up,” Mills said. “And then you have to refresh that system, and continue to refresh those satellites to exploit the advancements in technology.” Europe is using the EU Commission to fund a system that is just under 11 billion euros, he said, and the EU Commission is funding over 60% of that total.

Deper said that scale of investment is what’s needed for space architecture development has to progress. “In my opinion, sovereignty needs to come with higher commitments in terms of budgets,” Deper said. “Otherwise it doesn’t work.”

But there is another way to look at it, according to Reeves. “I would hesitate to think about space as just being kind of a wealthy country economy game,” he said. “I think that it needs to be looked at truly as a global economy.”

“There are a lot of conversations like these around sovereignty, because there’s uncertainty in the world. What are we focusing on? What are the customer problems to solve around sovereignty, around data assurance, around information assurance from an encryption perspective, making sure that those systems are built with those types of features?” Reeves added. “We have to have a flexible nature to those capabilities built into the system so that a country can benefit from some of the performance attributes of the modern commercial satcom systems.”