How Public Data Contributes to Space Domain Awareness

Over the last 10 years, the rise of the commercial space industry has allowed peer and near-peer adversaries to gain access to civilian-owned space-based platforms for the purposes of military communications and intelligence collection. Space is no longer an environment that is solely controlled by a small number of powerful nations, but an arena that presents both opportunities and threats in equal measure for almost every nation on earth. It is therefore critical for allied nations to prioritise their Space Domain Awareness (SDA) to better understand this increasingly complex and congested environment.

Space has become a highly contested arena for hybrid, cognitive and information operations. Today, military operations may depend upon windows of opportunities space-based assets wrench open in the electromagnetic spectrum, they may be targeted by multiple orbiting sensors, and will almost certainly be commanded and controlled via satellite.  

It’s for these reasons and many others that SDA is a growth area in Allied Militaries. The U.S. Space Force defines SDA as the “timely, relevant, and actionable understanding of the operational environment that allows military forces to plan, integrate, execute, and assess space operations.” It involves collecting intelligence from many different disciplines about each spacecraft and the environments they operate in to ensure safe and successful missions. Therefore, the contribution of Public Data to gaining, maintaining and protecting SDA is worthy of detailed investigation.  

Threats Are Converging Between Space and Terrestrial Domains

Between August 2023 and March 2024, aircraft over the Baltic reported roughly 46,000 instances of GPS interference, rising from under 50 incidents a week to more than 350. In 2022, a cyberattack on a satellite network disrupted communications across Europe, with effects reaching as far as thousands of wind turbines in Germany that briefly lost remote monitoring capability. In May 2024, the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades pushed nearly 5,000 satellites in low Earth orbit to manoeuvre simultaneously, the largest coordinated repositioning event on record. Foreign inspector satellites have also been tracked shadowing the satellites that European militaries rely on for communications.

None of this is secret. It’s playing out in public statements, open-source reporting, air-traffic data, and satellite tracking feeds. The sheer volume of data presents a significant problem. Space agencies and defence space commands aren’t lacking information. What they lack is time to make sense of it. As UK Space Command’s Major General Paul Tedman has put it, “data is the coin of the realm,” and the challenge now is turning volume into something operators can act on with confidence. The chair of the Space Data Association has been blunter still, describing a market with “almost too much information” for operators to put to good use.

The Ukraine conflict is an excellent example of actively using space-based capabilities—both commercial and military—to better understand the situation, determine the appropriate response, and more efficiently allocate finite resources to shape the environment in one’s favour. Ukraine also points to the speed at which leveraging multi-domain effects with space as the enabler is only accelerating.

You have to have space-based capabilities, whilst understanding and outmanoeuvring those of your adversaries, to win.

Dataminr Pioneered Public Data at Machine Speed

Dataminr First Alert can add clarity to SDA through awareness of relevant public sources at the speed of relevance. 

Dataminr is a native AI company with more than 60 purpose-built LLMs working around the clock, orchestrated to detect, corroborate, and contextualise events the moment they surface in publicly available information: government statements, defence publications, procurement disclosures, sensor data, imagery, video, and more, across 150+ languages and over a million public sources. This is working continuously with HiTL supervision, and operating at a scale no analyst team could ever match.

Enabling Decision Advantage in the Space Sector

Dataminr First Alert serves as a critical real-time situational awareness capability across the U.S. Space Force enterprise, directly powering mission readiness for Combined Forces Command (CFC) and its operational Deltas, Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), and Space Systems Command (SSC). Trusted at the highest echelons, over 90% of USSF senior leaders rely on First Alert to drive faster, more informed decision-making.

Within CFC, every Space Delta utilizes First Alert across all operational tiers, from tactical personnel on the floor to strategic decision-makers. The platform provides comprehensive domain visibility, surfacing real-time early warnings on everything from adversarial threats against space assets to dynamic space weather occurrences that could impact orbital operations and terrestrial systems. To ensure seamless operational utility, First Alert is directly integrated into USSF-specific data lakes, feeding real-time intelligence into existing organizational systems to create a unified common operating picture across the force.

Applied to the space domain, that capability shows up in specific, practical ways. 

• Launches, satellite deployments, re-entries, and defence space developments are frequently visible in open sources long before they appear in orbital tracking data: procurement notices, ground movements, and government announcements often surface days or weeks ahead. 
• The same open channels carry early signs of threats to space systems, from cyber activity targeting ground stations and satellite communications to counterspace developments such as jamming. 
• Geomagnetic storm warnings and other space weather alerts add a further layer, giving operators advance notice of conditions that can disrupt satellite communications and GNSS-dependent operations. 
• Government statements, defence publications, and procurement decisions also reveal a great deal about the capability and intent of other actors, often explaining why an event is happening rather than simply confirming that it is. 

And when something does happen, First Alert fuses reporting across sources and formats into a single, continuously updating picture, allowing exquisite assets to react and capture what is needed. 

Dataminr’s Place in SDA

First Alert does not calculate conjunctions or predict collisions, and it doesn’t track individual objects in orbit. Those tasks remain, rightly, the job of dedicated space surveillance and tracking sensors. What First Alert adds sits above that layer: context and an early-warning picture that turns a stream of diverse signals into decision advantage. It is ‘always on’, continuously monitoring but only triggering when thresholds are met. 

First Alert is relied upon by more than 100 government agencies and 30 international militaries, with a unique and market leading capability: mature alerting models trained on a historical 15 year data archive.  As SDA importance grows and assigned resources expand, First Alert is one area helping to reduce data noise, aiding clarity and giving operators context to operate in a cluttered, contested and confused picture.