The Watchman’s Keys

The US military has given SpaceX its secrets about the sky, on the reasonable grounds that SpaceX has become a large part of the sky.

That is the paradox, and nobody has troubled to say it plainly. Restricted space tracking data has always been the state’s most private diary: a record of where everything is, where it is going, and what might hit it. The diary has now been shown to a guest. The guest, however, has placed so many satellites in orbit that much of the diary is about him. One can hardly keep a man’s biography from its subject when the subject is also the publisher.

The strongest defence of the arrangement is entirely sensible, which is usually where the trouble begins. Orbit is crowded. A company operating a great many spacecraft must move them constantly to avoid collisions, and it cannot dodge what it cannot see. Better data means fewer collisions, fewer collisions mean less debris, and less debris keeps orbit usable for everyone, including the military. On this reading, withholding the data would be like declining to tell the busiest driver on the motorway where the fog is. It would be principled, and fatal.

I accept every word of that, and it is precisely the problem. An argument from necessity proves too much. If the US military shares restricted data with SpaceX because SpaceX is too large to leave blind, then the larger SpaceX grows, the stronger the case for telling it more. Necessity of this kind does not fix a boundary. It moves one, and it always moves it toward the biggest operator. A policy that rewards size with intimacy will, in time, produce a single very intimate and very large friend, and governments have historically found such friends difficult to leave.

Consider the people who were not in the room. Somewhere, in a modest office near a modest launch pad, an engineer at a smaller rival is looking at the public catalogue of orbital objects, which is accurate in the way a postcard is accurate about a city. The engineer’s company also has satellites. They also need to avoid collisions. They now share an orbit with a competitor who holds a better map, and the difference between the two maps is a matter of decision rather than skill. The worry raised about corporate control of the space industry is usually stated as a fear of monopoly. It is more exact to call it a fear of privileged visibility. Nobody has forbidden the smaller firms to fly. They simply fly with one eye shut, while their largest rival has been lent the military’s spectacles.

I should be careful about motive, since the facts here record an action and not an intention. One may infer that the military saw an operational need it could not ignore; one may equally infer that a government which already relies on SpaceX for launches found it simpler to deepen a dependence than to diversify away from it. Both readings are plausible. The unsettling thing is that they lead to the same place. Whether the door was opened from prudence or from habit, the result is that a commercial firm now sits inside a circle once reserved for the state, and circles of that kind rarely shrink.

The national security establishment has always feared that a private company might one day know too much; it has now solved the difficulty by telling it.

There is something almost touching in this. For decades the doctrine was that orbital awareness was a sovereign function, as unshareable as a password. The doctrine has not been repealed. It has simply been outgrown, the way a family heirloom is outgrown by being sold to the neighbour who already owns the rest of the street. What used to be secrecy has become membership, and membership, unlike secrecy, has a guest list. The real cost is not that the data might leak. The real cost is that the referee has begun lending its notebook to one of the players, and every other player must now wonder which other pages are being shown.

The competitors will appeal for equal access, and they may get it. But equal access granted later is a courtesy. Access granted first is an advantage, and in orbit the first to see the danger is the only one who never has to explain the debris.

Somewhere in a briefing room, a colonel is sliding a classified folder across the table, and the man on the other side is glancing at it to check that his own satellites are listed correctly.