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Space Threat Assessment 2023

This resource for policymakers and the public leverages open-source information to assess key developments in foreign counterspace weapons. Drawing on six years of collected data and analyses, this series describes trends in the development, testing, and use of counterspace weapons and enables readers to develop a deeper understanding of threats to U.S. national security interests in space. The past year was dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where space capabilities, including commercial satellites, played a highly visible and compelling role in Ukraine’s resistance to the invasion. Thus, this year’s featured analysis provides an in-depth look at Russia’s battlefield employment of counterspace weapons.

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Is There a Path to Counter Russia’s Space Weapons?

Why would Russia, the first nation to put a satellite and human into orbit, want to develop space weapons that could make parts of space unusable for up to a year? At first glance, it may be difficult to decipher Russian motivations. In 1939, British prime minister Winston Churchill famously observed that Russian decisionmaking was…

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Gold Rush: The 2024 Commercial Remote Sensing Global Rankings

Four leading institutions—the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Taylor Geospatial Institute, Taylor Geospatial Engine, and the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation—collaborated to produce a “Top 3” ranking of the world’s best commercial space-based remote sensing systems.  The results should spur policy conversations about the importance of U.S. leadership, the state of global competition (especially…

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Artemis Rewritten: NASA’s New Moon Plan, Its Risks, and Whether the U.S. Can Still Beat China

In early 2026, NASA made a consequential change to the Artemis program: Artemis III was no longer planned as a crewed lunar landing mission. Instead, Artemis III had been changed to a low Earth Orbit (LEO) demonstration flight that would test integrated operations between the Orion spacecraft and one or both commercial lunar landers being…

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