The 1967 Outer Space Treaty lays the foundation: no country can claim space or celestial bodies as territory, and placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit is prohibited. The treaty does not ban conventional weapons or military use of space — which leaves much military activity in a legal grey area.
Who is active:
- States with their own military space capability — above all the US, Russia and China, and also France, the UK, India, Japan and Israel, among others.
- Alliances — NATO owns no satellites itself, but coordinates what its members contribute (see 4.3).
- Commercial companies — SpaceX (Starlink), Planet, Maxar, ICEYE and many others. They provide imagery, connectivity and launches, including to armed forces. As a result, commercial satellites have become a party in conflict (see chapter 9).
More than ten thousand working satellites now orbit the Earth; most of them belong to one commercial constellation (Starlink). That makes space crowded, and every debris incident affects everyone.
The Netherlands is also building its own space capability. The Royal Netherlands Air Force's Defence Space Security Centre (DSSC) manages the military satellites; the nanosatellite BRIK-II (2021) was a first experiment. On 23 June 2025 the first operational satellite of the Dutch armed forces was launched: a radar satellite (SAR) built by the Finnish company ICEYE, the first of four within about a year. In addition, Defence is having two sovereign telescopes built to watch space, and in September 2025 decided on a small constellation of its own — so that the Netherlands depends less on foreign imagery and connectivity.