From earth to space: when sovereignty changes scale

What if the next great battle for sovereignty were no longer waged on Earth, but in deep space? Red Team Défense — the foresight initiative of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces — has imagined, for its Season 3, a scenario set on the horizon of 2075: two rival mega-consortiums vie for control of the strategic minerals of the Moon and the Asteroid Belt. Fiction? Only on the surface. This scenario in fact reveals a more immediate truth: sovereignty is no longer a fixed attribute, neither total nor even territorial. It has become the capacity to access, over time and under constraint, the resources — material, technological and human — that condition our freedom of action.

By Ludovic Chaker, Senior central government official, Deputy for strategic foresight to the Director general of armament.

Cyber, the first line of the space conflict

In this scenario, which projects us between 2030 and 2075, access to space has become considerably more democratic, thanks to a revolutionary rocket fuel and to the progress of autonomous robotics. The resources of the Moon and the Asteroid Belt — strategic minerals, rare earths, helium — become affordable and feed the industrial appetites of state and private actors alike. Alliances form, consortiums emerge. The competition between two mega-blocs first translates into practices of sabotage and access denial, before escalating towards open confrontation in space. Large-scale direct skirmishes between humans in space are rare and costly: every life in orbit represents considerable logistical investment. It is swarms of autonomous robots that clash first. But even before the machines collide, it is in cyberspace that the first round is fought. Space communication and navigation infrastructures are the Achilles' heel of any power dependent on the orbital economy. To saturate, deceive, divert or destroy these information flows is to blind the adversary without firing a single shot. Cyber attacks against the guidance systems of mining convoys, against inter-orbital communication relays or ground control centres, systematically precede any kinetic action. This logic is not purely fictional. In 2026, the Ukrainian theatre has already offered a striking illustration of what the loss of digital access can mean in a highintensity conflict. When tens of thousands of Starlink terminals, smuggled in via Turkey and Central Asia, became the backbone of encrypted communications and drone control for Russian forces, SpaceX imposed a registration requirement at Kyiv's urging. Undeclared devices were thereby blocked. Russian soldiers, suddenly blinded, sought out Ukrainians willing to register their terminals in exchange for cryptocurrency payments — and fell into a trap set by Ukraine's 256th Cyber Assault Division, which collected the GPS coordinates of more than 2,600 devices, revealing headquarters, command posts and drone pilot positions. Commercial digital infrastructure had been turned into a decisive vector of military action.¹

AI, quantum and cyber: an invisible arms race

In the universe of the Space Rush, artificial intelligence and quantum computing have profoundly reshaped the cyber balance of power. Attacks and defences are no longer solely the business of human engineers: autonomous agents drive offensive campaigns at speeds and on volumes impossible to handle manually. The cognitive saturation of defenders has become a tactic in its own right, for cognitive warfare too is inherent with every foresight scenario. AI plays several roles simultaneously. On the offensive side, it automates reconnaissance, the exploitation of vulnerabilities and the generation of decoys — including credible digital identities, as is already emerging today with the chatbots used by Ukrainians to extract information from Russian soldiers. On the defensive side, it continuously monitors the integrity of communication chains and detects behavioural anomalies in robotic fleets. Quantum computing, for its part, revives a question as old as cryptography itself: who will be capable of breaking the other's ciphers before the other breaks theirs? In the Red Team scenario, mastery of secure quantum communications becomes an absolute strategic advantage for the mining convoys operating beyond terrestrial reach. This notion of operational reach, and of the staggering distances to be covered in order to act within the space environment, in itself represents a major shift in awareness — one whose magnitude is difficult to grasp from the surface of the Earth. For cyber actors — companies, agencies, military units — this scenario means a permanent raising of the bar. It is no longer simply about protecting defined perimeters, but about guaranteeing the sovereignty of infrastructures that operate in radically degraded environments, without permanent connectivity, without direct human supervision, and against adversaries endowed with offensive capabilities of equivalent calibre.

Rethinking sovereignty

This notion of sovereignty, which is back in vogue, is generally conceived as an attribute of the State, guaranteed by the possession of identified, localised capabilities, controlled end-to-end. It attaches itself to clear perimeters — a territory, armed forces, an industrial base — and is measured in possessed resources. This conception, inherited from a more stable and more hierarchical world, rested on a clear distinction between the civilian and the military, between peacetime and times of crisis. This framework is today definitively obsolete. The difficulties encountered in the scaling-up of European satellite constellations, owing to dependencies on extra-European launchers, bear witness to this: without end-to-end mastery of critical supply chains, sovereignty remains theoretical. The rare-earths war illustrates how dependence on a single segment of a value chain can compromise the whole. Autonomy does not consist in eliminating all dependencies — in any realistic economy, dependencies will always exist — but in knowing them, so as to accept them consciously or to fill them by deliberate choice and priority-setting. In the Red Team scenario as in today's world, the most underestimated variable is the human one. No system — whether a satellite, an algorithm or a drone — is in itself sovereign. It becomes so only through the full set of skills required for its design, its operation, its maintenance and its adaptation under constraint. With the Space Rush, this challenge acquires an additional dimension. The few humans present in deep orbital space carry out their responsibilities without a safety net. The capacity of an engineer to grasp the degradation modes of an autonomous system operating several million kilometres from Earth, without access to any external support infrastructure, is precisely what makes the difference between a successful mission and a tragic accident.

What foresight teaches us: uncertainty as method

The value of the Space Rush scenario does not lie in its factual accuracy: the precise date on which a revolutionary rocket fuel will be commercialised matters little. It lies in its capacity to expose deep logics and structural tensions that are already at work — beyond the thought experiment itself, which is in any case an excellent exercise. Each new disruptive technology (the space fuel of the scenario, today's AI models, the private satellite constellations that now dominate space...) creates strategic opportunities but simultaneously generates new vulnerabilities. The very nature of uncertainty testifies to the fact that we no longer live in a world where risk is modellable and contained. We are facing instead the eruption of the unpredictable, the unprecedented, even the unknown. Systemic crises, cognitive warfare, abrupt supply disruptions render linear planning obsolete. What matters is no longer only to forecast, but to be structurally ready to act in the face of a diversity of possible contingencies.

Availability at the core

"Augmented sovereignty"² is no longer a static acquired state: it is a dynamic that is built over time and brutally revealed in crisis. It depends no longer only on what one owns outright, but on what one can effectively access when the environment degrades — whether technologies, data, components, skills or infrastructures. Sovereignty is no longer merely a capacity for autonomy, but a question of strategic availability: the aptitude to mobilise essential assets at the right moment, be they civilian, military, dual-use, material or immaterial. Understood in this way, sovereignty is no longer proclaimed. It is built, measured and steered. It rests less on the display of autonomy than on the capacity to organise, over time, the availability of strategic assets — from industrial capabilities and human skills to supply chains. It is this aptitude to have at one's disposal, at the chosen moment, what is essential, that underpins our freedom of action. Availability thus becomes the first condition of an augmented sovereignty. Three priorities emerge within this framework: to master disruptive technologies, in order not to be driven by innovation but to remain its driving force; to secure access to critical resources, in order to guarantee the continuity of the effort; and to invest massively in human potential, in order to have the key skills available at the right time and in the right place. If Red Team Défense invites us to look at space not as a distant and improbable horizon, but as the most extreme revealer of dynamics already at work, then the 2075 space rush begins today: in our training pipelines, our infrastructure choices, our willingness — or unwillingness — to build the industrial and technological alliances that will make our freedom of action durable. The frontier is no longer only up there. It is also here, in the way in which we decide, now, to organise the availability of tomorrow.

For more information: Find out about the RADAR initiatives and the work of the Chair of Advanced Studies on Sovereignty https://www.chaires-hes.fr/

¹ The Great Starlink Sting: How Ukrainian Hackers Are Duping Russian Troops, thetimes.com, 6 May 2026

² Towards an Augmented Sovereignty: Entering the Era of Strategic Power, Revue de la Défense Nationale, issue no. 881, June 2025.