This handout satellite image by Planet Labs PBC shows an aerial view of the city of Sevastopol after a missile attack struck the headquarters of Moscow's Black Sea fleet in annexed Crimea on 22 September, 2023, sparking a huge fire and leaving at least one Russian serviceman missing. Photo: HANDOUT / PLANET LABS
US President Donald Trump's pause on sharing military intelligence with Ukraine has left it partly blinded to Russian missile attacks and cut back its ability to find targets
But for the first time private satellite companies are in a place where they could plug the gap.
And New Zealand has helped put them there.
At the government level, whether New Zealand has stopped sharing intel with Ukraine too, was not a question defence and spy minister Judith Collins would answer on Thursday: "I'm not able in the national interest to speak about that."
She said only the country shared intelligence when it was in its national interest to do so.
But governments do not control the field of military intelligence in the way they once did. Previously, states did all the satellite spying, so could cut the flow.
The Ukraine war has overturned that. At least five private companies have been releasing and selling images during the war that once were only seen by spy agencies, news reports show. Researchers believe that might continue now, regardless of the US pause.
Ukraine has been christened the first "commercial space war". Its vice prime minister foresaw this just after Russia invaded in early 2022.
"This is the first major war in which commercially available satellite imagery may play a significant role in providing open-source information about troop movements, military buildups, in neighbouring countries, flows of refugees and more," Mykhailo Fedorov said.
Fedorov in March 2022 issued a plea on Twitter to eight satellite companies. "We badly need the opportunity to watch the movement of Russian troops, especially at night," he wrote, "We need data now."
@eos_da and @maxpolyakov appeal to the global remote sensing firms and organizations to provide real-time SAR data to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine with actionable intelligence. pic.twitter.com/DzfNze3K3r
— Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) March 1, 2022
His plea went out to Iceye, Maxar Technologies, Airbus, SI Imaging Services, SpaceView, BlackSky, Planet Labs and Capella. The latter three of those eight companies have launched satellites from New Zealand as recently as last month.
Fedorov's plea was answered, and his prediction came true. Planet Labs has been very active in Ukraine; it launched from Mahia peninsula in 2018 and 2020, on Rocket Lab rockets.
Capella launched from Mahia last year. In a briefing seeking ministerial approval for that, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment noted "Capella imagery is sold to both the US and Ukraine governments" to monitor the war. There was no national security risk to New Zealand, the ministry added.
Another of the eight firms Fedorov appealed to, BlackSky, has a highly detailed image of Russia's Black Sea fleet headquarters reproduced in the New York Times this week. BlackSky's most recent launch from Mahia was just last month.
Whether Mahia-launched satellites have taken images over Ukraine is not clear, since the companies launch from various sites with various types of satellite.
However, the 2024 Capella launch was a synthetic aperture radar satellite (SAR), and SARs have been particularly useful for Ukraine, as they can take high-resolution images day and night regardless of the weather.
Rocket Lab dubbed the 2024 mission 'A Sky Full Of SARs'; it also launched two SARs for Capella from its US launchpad in 2023.
Another US company, HawkEye 360, detected increased GPS interference in and around Ukraine before the Russian invasion. Subsequently, Rocket Lab has launched three surveillance satellites for HawkEye 360 from its pad in Virginia, US.
Distrust transformed
The other big change in state-commercial space spying is that governments have shelved their distrust and realised the benefits.
Previously, states were happy to trust the rapidly expanding commercial networks with weather and other civilian geospatial imagery, but not on the national security front, overseas news reporting shows. Now they are.
A Rocket Lab electron rocket. Photo: Supplied / Rocket Lab
Notably, the biggest user of satellite spying - the US government - is buying a lot more commercial imagery. On that front, it is possible a US Space Force-run satellite tracking hub in Auckland helps with this, as the hub is in a network recently given more tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking work, as RNZ has reported.
RNZ is seeking more information from the NZDF.
The network feeds surveillance data from commercial satellites operators in parallel with the US state spy satellites run by its National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). At least six NRO satellites have been launched from Mahia.
Two benefits states were tapping were that commercial satellites gave them more 'eyes on' a wider swathe of the Earth's surface, plus buying images from them avoided some of the tangles that came up with classified images, a professor at the US's Georgia Institute of Technology, Mariel Borowitz, said in 2022.
"This aspect makes it easier for the military to share satellite information within the US government as well as with US allies. This advantage has proved to be a key factor for the war in Ukraine," Borowitz wrote.
Judith Collins. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
New rewards, new risks
Any country developing a space industry now faces a new landscape where commercial satellites are complementing what states have, as a new source of surveillance for spy agencies and armies.
New Zealand has a government strategy released last year to try to double the space industry to about $3 billion by 2030.
Collins has promised lower regulatory barriers and more streamlining for rockets, ground-based space radar and aerospace.
Aerospace includes high-altitude drone flights that might one day complement commercial satellite surveillance.
The Boston Consulting Group on Thursday identified space and satellites among five sectors New Zealand should explore diversifying into.
"A starting point for investigation [was] designing and manufacturing componentry, launch vehicles, and satellites," it said. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/future-of-nz-inc-what-will-new-zealand-be-known-for-in-2050
Though actual rocket launchpads have been researched by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), Collins last October ruled out subsidising pad construction - at least for now - at the best site, south of Christchurch, likely for fiscal reasons. This leaves only Mahia, owned by Rocket Lab, for launches.
Rocket Lab is also making satellites and other space vehicle componentry in Auckland and at various subsidiaries in the US.
The benefits of expanding the space industry are widely canvassed in the MBIE strategy and official briefings. But these typically say little about the risks, or blank them out entirely.
MBIE has said it has not looked at the risk to New Zealand from any adversary that took exception to launches from here of satellites that might be used against them.
Yet this is exactly the question posed by the Ukraine war.
On the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of the US state spy satellite agency National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) warned that commercial satellite companies could be the target for cyberattacks by Moscow.
Russia itself a little later in 2022 warned it could consider commercial companies a target if they helped its enemies.
"We repeat for those who refuse to understand: Quasi-civil infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation," the deputy head of Russia's delegation told the UN General Assembly.
US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, 28 February, 2025. Photo: AFP / SAUL LOEB
MBIE has said its system for assessing the risks of satellite and other payload launches was "robust".
A parliamentary advisory committee has,however said, "MBIE could prioritise scrutinising the potential as well as intended uses of the payload."
The use of images from satellites launched at Mahia that might have been used in the Gaza war was raised by the Green Party in Parliament, but dismissed by the government.
The spy agencies, SIS and GCSB, have said they did national security risk assessments for all activities licensed or permitted under the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act and provided national security risk advice to ministers.
At the time of Fedorov's plea to satellite companies in March 2022, Planet Labs had released images of a destroyed bridge and cargo plane at a Ukrainian air base on the internet and to the media. The Washington Post called it "real-time documentation of the war", reporting how senators had begun asking US Space Command what the legal framework was "when "private actors become involved in contested situations".
"What happens if a commercial entity from the United States provides actionable intelligence - images of a Russian convoy, for example - to a foreign government that then uses that data to mount an attack?" the Post asked.
"Would Russia be justified in attacking the satellite? And if that were to happen, how should the US government respond?"
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
