Space governance you can step inside.
Read the launch brief →howdy [at] diplospace · orgSupport the work →
An immersive translation layer for space governance
The treaties, orbits, and debris fields diplomats argue about, turned into something you can step inside.
Diplo Space is a nonprofit lab. We turn contested space regimes into navigable 3D scenarios and crisis exercises: the rival U.S. and China–Russia rulebooks for the Moon, orbital debris, a GPS-denial crisis. Diplomats, congressional staff, and allied officials rehearse the decision before it’s real, with every claim tied to a primary source.
Nonprofit · no policy positionsPrimary sources, citedBuilt for non-specialistsCandid Platinum transparency
The problem, in plain English
Space runs on rules most people never see. Right now they’re straining in public.
The rules are invisible
Space runs on rules most people never see: who may use which orbit, who answers for a piece of debris, whose signal has right of way, who gets which slice of spectrum. They live in treaties and UN documents.
And they're straining, in public
70 nations have signed the Artemis Accords for the Moon; a China–Russia bloc is writing a competing rulebook for the same ground. Orbits fill with debris, spectrum fights sharpen, and GPS interference is now a daily feature of conflict zones.
Faster than anyone can learn it
The officials who must decide (diplomats, congressional staff, allied civil servants) are asked to act faster than they can understand a domain they can't see. We turn the regime into something they can walk through, and the decision into something they can rehearse.
How it works
See the regime. Rehearse the decision.
One loop: a verified record underneath, a navigable explainer on top, an immersive scenario to rehearse in, and an after-action record you keep. Every piece runs in a plain browser.
Step inside: the scenarios
Rehearse an orbital crisis in a navigable 3D scenario
A debris cascade and a GPS-denial event, walked through in three dimensions and rehearsed as a decision before it becomes a crisis. Fully remotable, so you don't have to fly everyone to one room; you leave with an after-action record.
Already published · the Field NotesAll four →
01
02
03
04See the regime: the explainers
See the explainers →A governance split, made navigable
The rival U.S. and China–Russia maps for the Moon; the Outer Space Treaty's stress points; the geography of a fight over who gets which slice of radio spectrum at the UN's telecom body. Each one turns a contested regime into something a non-specialist can see: every claim tied to treaty text or a UN document.
The substrate: the record
Open the record →A verified, dated, citable scenario record
The open record of space-governance incidents and stress points the explainers and scenarios draw on: each entry dated, tied to a primary source, and built to still check out when your memo is read a year from now.
How it renders
How we build it →3D that runs in a plain browser
We build the scenes ourselves from primary data, bake them offline, and spend the real effort on the translation. Every scene runs in a plain browser; a headset is an enhancement, never a gate.
Plainly: the record is what happened, an explainer is what it means, a scenario is the decision rehearsed, and the after-action record is what you change. The problem was never too little information; it’s a domain officials can’t see. Everything here exists to make it navigable.
The strategist’s toolkit
Where the models meet the decision.
Three planning shorthands recur in this field: DIME for the instruments of national power, OODA for the tempo of a decision, ends-ways-means for strategy itself. Each is powerful. Each is a lens, not the whole picture.
DIME
The instruments of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, economic.
OODA
The tempo of a decision: observe, orient, decide, act.
Ends · Ways · Means
Strategy itself: fix the end, then choose the ways and means, not the reverse.
Diplo Space is where they get used. Our scenarios drop you into a real space decision and let you bring whatever framework you already use, applied against the actual regime, the actual clock, and the actual trade-offs, not run as a checklist.
Built by an operator fluent in all of them: from strategy implementation at U.S. European Command, coordinating allied space work in theater, to navigation-warfare architecture at the FAA. Setting a strategy is hard; making it real is harder.
Try the 15-minute scenario →
Where the tracking startsHaleakalā Observatory, Maui. Before anything can be governed in orbit it has to be seen from the ground, and this is one of the places that does the seeing.Who watches the sky →
the-observatory / surviving-field / iridium-cosmos-2009DEBRIS CASCADE
2009-02-10 · 16:55:59 UTC · contactNot an illustration
696 fragments, still up there.
Every dot is a catalogued fragment of the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision, on its real orbit, from the public catalogue. Scrub the replay and watch two orbits close, contact over Taymyr, and the debris spread into the band it still occupies.
Nobody broke a rule that day. That is the finding.
Open the instrument →Then make the call →Also at room scale
The Atlas runs on Apple Vision Pro.
Five instruments on one tray, drawing the same dated edition this site serves: the orbital shells, the Moon, the timeline, and two rehearsals you can walk into. In limited testing now.
See the Atlas →The scenario record
The record, kept in the open.
Space-governance incidents and the policy moves around them: dated, tied to a primary source you can open, and citable in a memo.
2026-07-17Mauritius becomes the 70th Artemis Accords signatoryPolicy
2026-07-13SDA awards $1.75B for Golden Dome tracking satellitesFunding
2026-07-06UN space arms-race working group holds third sessionPolicy
2026-07-03EASA issues Revision 4 of its GNSS-interference bulletinPolicy
What 84 verified entries show7 of 84 produced anything binding.
40 never got past acknowledgement. Every entry is coded 0–4 for how far it actually travelled toward a coordinated response, against the primary source.
11Logged
29Acknowledged
15Multilateral
22Coordinated
7Binding
Who it’s for
Built for the official who can’t see the domain they decide on.
We built this for four kinds of official. If one of them is you, you should know where to start in about thirty seconds.
Diplomats & desk officers
You've been handed a space-security portfolio with no engineering background. You need to see the regime and rehearse the decision, not read another report.
See an explainer →Congressional & committee staff
You're drafting language on orbital debris, PNT, or a treaty stress point. You want a neutral, citable, navigable picture you can defend line by line.
Open the record →Allied & Global-South civil servants
You're building space literacy for a team or a delegation. You'd rather rehearse an orbital-crisis decision in 3D than sit through a lecture.
Step into a scenario →Funders & institutional partners
You back neutral public goods, and you check the EIN, the board, and the funding firewall first. It's all one click away.
See how we're built →Who builds the work
Built by a workforce employers overlook.
The lab runs as small, time-boxed volunteer research cohorts, built around a credentialed, mobile, badly underused group: military spouses and Foreign Service family members. We offer the one thing the work usually can’t: a published byline that travels with you.
Why trust a lab you’ve never heard of?
Don’t. Check us instead.
We’re new, and we won’t pretend otherwise. What we can give you on day one: every claim carries its source, the data is open and dated, the boundary is in writing, and the legal facts are one click away. The analysis and the judgment here are a person’s; where AI speeds the legwork, a human still opens every source and signs every claim. How we work is on the About page.
Diplo Space, Inc. is a Virginia 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 99-1402470. No findings for sale, no positions taken, no foreign-government money.
501(c)(3) · VirginiaEIN 99-1402470Founded 2024
Brandon N. Eickhoff
Founder & CEO
17+ years in geospatial intelligence, satellite navigation and its disruption, and allied space planning: from strategy implementation at U.S. European Command to navigation-warfare architecture at the FAA. He runs the verification gate that clears every published claim, and serves unpaid.
- Strategy implementation at U.S. European Command
- NavWar & PNT-resilience architecture at the FAA
- Runs the verification gate on every claim
- Serves unpaid
Work with us
Bring a scenario to your team.
Host a rehearsal, sponsor an explainer or a record increment, or just email a human and ask a question.