When he was a senior Pentagon official, Charles (or Chuck) Beames and his fellow military planners would speak forebodingly about “a day without space.”

The nightmare scenario would involve a wide-ranging attack, kinetic or otherwise, on space systems, which could produce cascading communications and navigation failures for the armed forces (and wreak havoc on civilian technology systems as well). While that scenario hopefully never comes to pass, space is no longer a sanctuary nor uncontested higher ground. And securing civil, commercial, and military spacecraft is the order of the day.