Space governance you can step inside.
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About the lab
Small on purpose. Neutral by structure.
Diplo Space turns the treaties, orbits, debris fields, and signal maps of space governance into navigable scenarios the officials who must act can step inside. Here's everything you'd want to verify first.
What we do, no jargon
Diplo Space is a small nonprofit. We turn the treaties, orbits, debris fields, and signal geographies that diplomats and officials argue about into navigable 3D scenarios and crisis exercises they can step inside, so a non-specialist can see the regime and rehearse the decision without being an engineer or holding a clearance. We take no policy positions, accept no foreign-government money, and cite a primary source for every claim.
The legal reality
An organization, not just a website.
Diplo Space, Inc. is a Virginia 501(c)(3) public charity, incorporated in 2024, EIN 99-1402470. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
The lab works from the greater Washington, DC region and facilitates immersive tabletops in person or fully remote. We travel for funded engagements.
Neutrality here is structural, not a slogan: we don’t sell findings, we don’t take policy positions, and everything we publish is built from sources you can check yourself.
Diplo Space built the working Atlas on the founder's own time and money: no grant, no contract, no donor to date. That has kept the conclusions clean, and it now limits how fast the platform can reach the public. We are seeking a small group of founding partners for the Atlas founding release, and every one of them will be disclosed here by legal name and amount. We operate under a published Funding Integrity Policy: no money contingent on conclusions, no federal-contract or foreign-government money, and every gift of $1,000 or more disclosed to the dollar.
501(c)(3) · VirginiaEIN 99-1402470990-N filed FY2025
Brandon translates contested space regimes into navigable scenarios, builds the lab's immersive stack on open standards, and runs the verification gate that clears every published claim. Diplo Space exists because the officials deciding on space governance (diplomats, congressional staff, allied civil servants) had no navigable way to see the domain in their charge.
Brandon’s full background
Brandon has spent 17+ years across the civil, commercial, and allied faces of space: strategy implementation as theater liaison to the Space Development Agency at U.S. European Command, coordinating allied ground-segment work with the Norwegian Ministry of Defence; PNT-resilience and navigation-warfare architecture at the FAA for a 150-member interagency coalition spanning DoD, DHS, and the White House NSC; briefings to Five Eyes intelligence executives on multi-source fusion and to the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences on space-enabled air-and-missile defense. Earlier: fourth hire at a remote-sensing startup that grew to 210 people, directing operations for a Tier-1 commercial satellite-imagery platform serving 16.3 million image views a year, then a director at Intel by 26.
- Strategy implementation at U.S. European Command
- NavWar & PNT-resilience architecture at the FAA
- Runs the verification gate on every claim
- Serves unpaid
Brandon N. EickhoffFounder & CEO · President
Dale BastinTreasurer · Lt Col, USAF (Ret.) · doctoral candidate
Lisa EickhoffSecretary
The field, honestly
If we’re not the right door, here’s the right one.
Space governance has excellent institutions, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose your trust. So here’s the map we’d give a colleague, organized by what you need, not by name, including where the answer is us.
Deep specialist analysis
The specialist research shops
Hundreds-of-page threat assessments, for the analyst. We cite them, and we write the ten-minute version for the official who can't read three hundred pages this week.
Advocacy with a position
The PNT-resilience associations
They argue a case: a backup system, a budget line. We translate instead, so you can be cited from either side of a hearing room.
Grand convening & diplomacy
The big diplomatic institutions
Ambassador-level forums at institutional scale. Our rooms are a dozen seats with your own continuity plans on the table: the working level, not the summit.
Elite & classified wargaming
The spacepower centers and war colleges
Senior leaders and allied militaries, often classified. Ours are public-source and built for the working level: desk officers, committee staff, and allied civil servants.
Watching it unfold, cinematically
The open-source storytellers
Crises replayed on 3D globes while the event's still moving. Brilliant, and we watch them too. Come here for the version you can put in a memo: verified, dated, citable.
The ten-minute version, with receipts
Diplo Space, that's us
One workflow (a verified record, plain-language briefs, small rehearsable exercises) for the official who has to act. Capable shops work the specialist end; to our knowledge, nobody else does the assembly for the working level.
Want a specific name for your specific problem? Email us. Referring you to the right shop is part of the job, and we do it happily.
The obvious question
“Can’t I just ask an AI?”
Honestly: ask it. We do too. And it keeps getting better: the good assistants now cite their sources, increasingly including records like the one we keep. That isn’t a threat to this lab; it’s the design. Somebody still has to make and maintain the thing worth citing, and an answer engine is only as accountable as the records underneath it. The same goes for the spectacular open-source-intelligence (OSINT) reconstructions on your feed: a talented builder can replay a crisis on a 3D globe in a weekend, and some do it brilliantly. Acting is different. Acting needs something a staffer can cite and an oversight committee can check. A record is the actable form of open-source intelligence.
What a maintained record adds is what a synthesis can’t: a named human who signs every row, primary sources that were actually opened, a dated edition your footnote can pin, and a public correction trail when we get something wrong. The AI finds the substrate faster every month. We build the substrate. Both halves get better together.
Method
Source → analyze → review → publish.
Our method is simple and human: public sources in, a person verifies every claim against a primary source, and it ships with receipts. Here it is.
01
Public sources only
Government documents, public filings, published studies, reputable reporting. Nothing classified, proprietary, or scraped from gray areas.
02
Human review
Work is reviewed before release, and boundary-adjacent work waits for it. We’re building a small advisory bench of reviewers, named here when they’ve said yes in writing, not before.
03
Published, with receipts
Sources on every page, corrections noted where they happen, datasets dated, archived, and mirrored openly.
Tooling, disclosed: AI assistants do research legwork and drafting here. We build at the same weekend speed everyone does now; we publish at verification speed, and the gap between those two is the product. Verification against primary sources and the decision to publish are human. The record, dated and sourced row by row, is the audit trail.
See the work →Ask us anything
Funding integrity
Neutrality, written down as rules.
Diplo Space operates under a published Funding Integrity Policy, intentionally stricter than 501(c)(3) or Virginia law requires, to protect the lab's analytic neutrality and the credibility of its work.
No foreign-government money
No funds, in-kind support, or directed gifts from any foreign government, state-owned enterprise, sovereign wealth fund, or foreign political party, directly or through an intermediary.
Public donor disclosure
Every cash or in-kind gift of $1,000 or more is disclosed to the exact dollar, by donor legal name. Anonymous gifts above that threshold are refused.
Screening
Before accepting any gift of $1,000+, the Treasurer screens the donor against the OFAC SDN list, the Consolidated Screening List, the BIS Entity List, the DDTC Debarred List, and the FARA registrant list.
No positions, no lobbying
We take no policy positions and do not lobby; we file IRS Form 5768 to elect the 501(h) expenditure test and track lobbying at zero.
A public refusal log
Every offered gift we decline is logged publicly, with the donor category, date, and amount declined.
Sponsorship, not advertising
Sponsor acknowledgments follow the IRS qualified-sponsorship rules: name and logo, no comparative language or endorsement, no exclusive-provider terms, and anything a sponsor receives valued in writing and kept under two percent of the payment.
Plain-language glossary
Every term, one sentence.
If a word on this site needs a specialist to decode it, that’s our failure, not yours. Here’s the whole vocabulary.
GPSThe U.S. government's satellite-navigation system: the original, and still the dominant signal civilian phones, ships, planes, banks, and power grids all follow.
GNSSThe umbrella term for all the world's satellite-navigation systems: the U.S. GPS, Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's BeiDou.
PNTPositioning, Navigation, and Timing. These are the three services satellites like GPS deliver: where you are, where you're heading, and exactly what time it is.
JammingDrowning out the satellite signal with noise so receivers can't hear it.
SpoofingBroadcasting a fake satellite signal that tricks receivers into believing a wrong location or time.
NAVWARMilitary shorthand for “navigation warfare”: deliberate attacks on satellite-navigation signals, or the protection of one's own signals against them. (We avoid this word in plain-language work; it's here so you can recognize it.)
ConjunctionThe moment two objects in orbit pass close enough that operators must decide whether to move one out of the way.
CounterspaceAnything done deliberately to interfere with, damage, or destroy another country's satellites or the ground stations and signals that run them.
Rules of orbitThe written and unwritten agreements between countries about what is and isn't allowed in space: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, ITU radio rules, ICAO aviation rules, and the norms being negotiated at the UN in Geneva.
OSTThe Outer Space Treaty (1967): the foundational agreement that space is for peaceful use, belongs to no nation, and that states answer for whatever they launch.
Artemis AccordsA U.S.-led set of principles for peaceful, transparent cooperation on the Moon and beyond; 71 nations had signed as of August 2026.
ILRSInternational Lunar Research Station: the China–Russia-led plan for a Moon base, the main alternative to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords.
CislunarThe space between the Earth and the Moon, and around the Moon: the new arena for lunar bases, traffic, and the rules that will govern them.
ASATAnti-satellite weapon: a missile, another satellite, a laser, or a jammer used to disable or destroy a satellite.
ITUThe International Telecommunication Union: the UN body that allocates the radio spectrum and the satellite orbital slots that nations and operators contest.
OSNMAGalileo's signal authentication: it lets a receiver check that a satellite-navigation signal is genuine, not faked. It defends against spoofing, not jamming.
Export-control posture. We analyze and rehearse decisions from public-domain information. We do not produce, host under restricted terms, or transmit technical data or know-how relating to controlled items. Every artifact is published under CC-BY 4.0 and falls inside the ITAR public-domain (22 C.F.R. §120.34) and EAR published-information / fundamental-research (15 C.F.R. §§734.7–734.8) exclusions; we link to Space-Track and CelesTrak rather than mirroring orbital data.
Not to be confused. Diplo Space, Inc. is a U.S. 501(c)(3) (Virginia, EIN 99-1402470). It is not affiliated with DiploFoundation (Geneva) or with the musician Diplo.
A line we keep in writing
Diplo Space, Inc. is a nonprofit public-interest research and education lab. It uses open-source and public-domain data to translate space-governance regimes into navigable scenarios and exercises for non-specialist officials. It takes no policy positions, accepts no foreign-government funding, and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of State, the Department of War, or any government agency.