Standing in the gap, looking up

I have spent most of my career in technology, and most of that in security. Endpoint, then cloud, and more recently, the partner ecosystems. The longer I have done it, the more my attention has drifted upward, to a part of our infrastructure that the security industry barely thinks about and that more or less everything now depends on.

The space layer.

There are already thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, with tens of thousands more planned across the megaconstellations being built right now. They carry our communications, our timing signals, our imagery, and connectivity into places that have never had it. When people talk about critical national infrastructure, they usually mean power, water, telecoms, and finance. They rarely mean the orbital and ground systems that a growing share of all of that quietly relies on.

So here is the thing that keeps pulling at me. We have spent twenty years learning how to secure enterprise IT, and we have built a serious industry around it. We have done almost none of that work for the space layer. The satellites, the ground stations, the supply chains behind them, the protocols holding them together. Much of it was designed for a world where the main threat was physics rather than adversaries. The assumption was that getting to orbit was hard enough to count as a security control in its own right. That assumption is gone.

The reason it sits unsolved is structural. The people who understand satellites rarely come from security. The people who understand security rarely look up. The two communities use different languages, go to different conferences, and answer to different regulators. The interesting problems live in the gap between them, and gaps are where things go wrong.

I ended up in that gap almost by accident. I went back to study global security at King's College London while working full-time, mostly because I wanted to think properly about something rather than just react to it, and because my interest in the geopolitics and security of the world around us had grown well past reading the news. That turned into research on the cyber and physical vulnerabilities of dual-use space infrastructure, which turned into a book, Swarm, due from Potomac Books in early 2027. Along the way, I built a small tool, Swarmwatch, to track the constellations, because I wanted to see the thing I was writing about rather than imagine it. None of that was a career plan. It was just following the thread.

And that is why I am writing this. Somewhere in the last couple of years, I worked out that what I actually value in work is not the same as what the industry rewards. Depth. I like understanding something well enough to build with it. I would rather make one thing real than manage the appearance of ten. A lot of senior technology work has drifted towards optics and presence, and being seen in the right rooms. I understand why it happens. I am just not very interested in it, and I do not think the important problems get solved that way. They get solved by people who go deep and stay long enough to do the unglamorous engineering, build the relationships that actually move things and challenge the status quo.

The space layer will need exactly that. Over the next decade, the questions get sharper. Who governs a constellation that spans every jurisdiction at once? What happens to deterrence when the infrastructure of conflict is commercial and dual-use. How a satellite operator proves its ground segment is trustworthy to a regulator who has never had to ask the question before. These are not edge cases waiting politely at the margins. They will be central, and we are starting late.

That is where I want to point myself, so let me be plain about it. I want to bring what I have spent a career learning, how to take a complex security and technology proposition to market and make it land in the space domain. There is real work in bridging the two worlds: the commercial side that knows how to build, sell, and scale, and the space sector that needs exactly that as it grows up. Leading partnerships and go-to-market for a company in this space, or building the security and strategy function that the sector still lacks. The shape matters less to me than the substance. I want something I can build and stand behind, with the travel and the genuine engagement that comes with it, and none of the performance that passes for senior work. That is the work I want to be doing.

I do not have all of this worked out, and that is rather the point. I want to think openly and find others already standing in the same gap, looking up. So if any of this lands with you, I would like to talk. It does not matter whether you come at it from space, from security, from policy, or from somewhere stranger than all of them. If you are interested in this, I would like to hear from you.

The work that matters usually starts as a conversation. Consider this as me starting one, and the door is open to anyone who wants to have it.