Verification 2.0: A New Approach to Outer Space Security Verification

For decades, efforts to develop new instruments for outer space security have been plagued by the persistent recognition that adherence to new commitments would be difficult to verify. That is, proposed agreements constraining particular satellite behaviours deemed mutually unacceptable by a collection of states could be easily violated without others knowing about it. While foolproof verification mechanisms are distinctly missing from some foundational instruments of space security – such as Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) that bans the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit – concerns about effective verification continue to drive contemporary discussions on the prevention of an arms race in outer space. But the conditions that make verification challenging in space are changing. When combined, recent developments in information sharing among satellite operators and advances in space domain awareness (SDA) create new opportunities for non-intrusive verification. Together, their potential to support diplomacy in today’s low-trust environment warrants closer study. 

This Policy Brief proposes a new approach, referred to here as Verification 2.0, that treats verification as a structured comparison between two inputs: 

1. Declarations by states about their satellites’ planned behaviours; and 
2. Independent observations of these satellites in operation.

By inspecting the differences between the purported satellite behaviour declared by states and actual satellite behaviour discerned by observation, any capable party can assess adherence to a certain class of space security agreements and investigate activities of concern. 

This Verification 2.0 framework offers opportunities to verify not just future instruments for space security, but some existing treaties and non-binding norms that already influence behaviour in the outer space domain. The following section introduces the security challenges surrounding space domain awareness that inspired the framework, the third section introduces the kinds of information-sharing processes and observation practices central to it, and the fourth section demonstrates its application across three cases and considers a fourth case that tests the framework’s limits.