Overview

There are more than sixteen thousand active satellites in orbit at the start of 2026, doing work for you every minute of every day. They tell you where you are, what time it is, what is happening on the other side of the world, and what the weather will do tomorrow. They guide ships, synchronise markets, route aircraft, monitor wars, and carry internet to places beyond the last fibre line. They do all of this almost entirely without being noticed.The Satellites That Watch the World is the authoritative single-volume account of the orbital infrastructure on which the modern world now depends. It is the fourth volume in an emerging series about the physical and institutional infrastructure that holds the digital economy together, following The Cables That Bind the World, The Buildings That Store the World, and The Standards That Run the World. Spanning the early Cold War rocket programmes, the commercial revolution that produced Starlink, the military competition for space superiority, the Arctic geography of ground stations, the European race for strategic autonomy, and the governance vacuum at the heart of it all, this book sets out how the orbital layer has come to underwrite the modern world - and what the decisions being taken now will mean for the next half-century. What you will learn: How GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou divide the world between four competing navigation systems Why Starlink changed not just internet access but the architecture of military communications How commercial satellite imagery has reshaped the work of journalists, intelligence agencies, and human rights investigators What happened to space governance after 1979 - and why nothing binding has been agreed since The Arctic ground-station geography that makes Svalbard one of the most strategically important islands in the world How the Russia-Ukraine war became the first conflict where commercial satellites were operationally decisive What a serious answer to the orbital debris problem would actually require A companion briefing edition - The Satellites That Watch the World: The Briefing - is available separately for readers with less time.

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