Space governance you can step inside.
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Immersive crisis tabletops
Rehearse the crisis. Step inside the decision.
An orbital crisis is hard to decide on because it's hard to see. So we turn one — an anti-satellite (ASAT) strike, a debris cascade, a GPS-denial event — into a navigable 3D scenario your team can walk through and rehearse as a decision before it's real. Fully remotable; a browser is all you need, a headset is a bonus.
The scenarios
Crises built to step inside.
Each is a navigable rehearsal, not a slide deck — anchored to the verified record and designed to surface the decision, not just the failure. Some are playable today; others are in design, published when they’re ready, not before.
SignalPlayable
GPS denial over a capital region
The satellite signal a city runs on goes unreliable in the middle of a crisis — who owns the call, and when. A free, self-guided rehearsal you can step through in about fifteen minutes — and the documented March 2026 Hormuz interference, rebuilt in 3D where it happened, further down this page.
Play it — free →OrbitalLive view
Debris cascade in low Earth orbit
A single collision multiplies into a debris field that can close an orbit. Step inside the surviving field of the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision — its still-tracked fragments, on their current orbits in today's public catalogue.
Step into the field →CounterspaceIn design
ASAT escalation
An anti-satellite event forces an attribution-and-response decision under time pressure, across diplomatic and military channels at once. In design against the verified record — the Fengyun-1C (2007) and Cosmos 1408 (2021) tests, now coded rows — published when it's ready, not before.
CoordinationIn design
The conjunction nobody owns
Two working satellites, two operators, one converging path — and no rule or authority to say who moves. A multi-party rehearsal built on the documented 2019 Aeolus–Starlink near-miss, paired with Field Note 04. In design — published when it's ready, not before.
TimingIn design
The clock stops
Satellite timing degrades and the grid, financial markets, and telecoms drift at once — the same disruption read four different ways, with no one owning the cross-sector call. A cascade rehearsal paired with Field Note 02. In design — published when it's ready, not before.
Try the room
GPS Denial Over a Capital Region
GPS goes unreliable across a metro area on a normal Tuesday. Participants play the emergency-management coordinator, the grid operations lead, the aviation authority duty officer, and the city communications director — and discover, inject by inject, who owns the call. Step through the five injects below the way a real session runs them — facilitated, no specialist knowledge assumed.
T+0:00 · inject 01 of 05
Detection and confusion
A Tuesday, 09:40. The airport reports degraded GPS approaches. Separately, a grid operator's monitoring units start flagging timing alarms. Nobody has connected the two yet.
On the hot seat: Aviation authority
Do you issue an advisory now, on partial information — or wait for confirmation and lose the morning?
What this inject surfaces: This inject is built to surface that the two reports travel different channels — and would not meet for hours. The first fix is usually a phone tree, not a technology.
Step inside
The navigable view is the rehearsal.
A debris cascade or a near-miss at 789 km is hard to argue about until you can see the neighborhood. So you can — in a plain browser. Load the live globe and you’re looking at the debris that 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision left behind — its surviving fragments, on their current orbits in today’s public catalogue, in 3D. We build this on the same off-the-shelf photoreal 3D the big mapping platforms now hand everyone, so the engine was never the hard part. The hard part, and the point, is the verified record underneath and the decision on top.
the-observatory / surviving-field / iridium-cosmos-2009DEBRIS CASCADE
▣ CONJUNCTION REPLAY · 2009-02-10
Establishing. The orbital environment — the public catalogue rendered as a swarm.
The 2009 Conjunction
01
Establish
The orbital environment, as catalogued.
02
Zoom to the shell
Descend to 789 km; the neighborhood thins.
03
The 2009 collision
10 Feb 2009, 16:56 UTC: two tracks meet over Taymyr.
04
The field it left
Fragments still tracked today, across the shell.
05
The decision
Who maneuvers, on whose data, under what rule?
CLOSING GEOMETRY · ILLUSTRATIVE→ contact
Illustrative reconstruction from public catalogue data (CelesTrak / Space-Track) and published analysis. Covariance and closing geometry shown for legibility, not operational accuracy. The consequence is not illustrative: several hundred fragments of this 2009 collision are still tracked on orbit today.
Several hundred fragments of this collision are still tracked on orbit — what you’re looking at is the current public catalogue, not the 2009 cloud. The event is in the record, with sources, and the governance question it leaves — who must maneuver, on whose data, under what rule — still has no binding answer under the Outer Space Treaty’s Article VI/IX “due regard” duty.
GPS-denial geography
Documented events, rebuilt where they happened.
Charts tell you interference happened; this shows you what it looks like. Below: the March 2026 Gulf jamming surge from our record, reconstructed over the real strait — actual terrain, actual buildings, and the one image no feed conveys: each ship’s true course versus where its GPS claims it is. We only rebuild documented events from the verified record, and every synthetic element says so on its face. Gifted open-source storytellers already replay crises on globes — and that’s the point: the view is a commodity. What isn’t is the pairing underneath — a verified public record, the deception made legible, and a decision to rehearse on top.
the-observatory / replay / hormuz-2026-03ILLUSTRATIVE
Documented event: 1,650+ ships affected on March 7, 2026 across ~30 interference clusters, Kuwait to Muscat (Windward; UKMTO logged 13 incidents in nine days) — the record row, with sources. Geography and buildings are real (Cesium World Terrain, OpenStreetMap); every ship track is synthesized to show the documented failure signatures, not actual vessel data. The amber haze is the corroboration layer: every airliner broadcasts its GPS confidence, so the airline fleet doubles as an interference-sensor network — extent illustrative, mechanism per public ADS-B-derived interference maps. And the distinction the news coverage blurs, now visible side by side in the replay: jamming drowns the signal so a receiver goes quiet; a transponder switched off goes dark — watch the one vessel whose marker simply freezes at onset, absence of data; but a spoofed receiver confidently reports a position that is wrong. The spoofed ships are the ones that break a navigator’s picture without ever looking broken.
How a rehearsal reaches your team
Three ways in — most of them free.
Facilitated pilots are funded by institutions and sponsors; the self-guided scenario and the open toolkit are free, so the method outlives any one budget.
90 minutes · remote or in personFacilitated immersive tabletop$5K–$20K introductory · institution- or sponsor-backed
A navigable orbital-crisis scenario run for your team — a desk, a delegation, a policy cohort — with full facilitation. Fully remotable, so you don't have to fly everyone to one room to rehearse the decision.
You keep the scenario, the inject schedule, and an after-action / improvement record.~15 minutes · in-browserSelf-guided scenarioFree
Step through a scenario at your own pace in a plain browser — the fastest way to feel how a rehearsal runs before you bring one to your team.
You keep your decisions and an after-action summary.Free · CC-BYOpen exercise toolkitFree
The open method for building these tabletops — facilitation guide, inject templates, after-action structure. A public good, never sold as software, so any institution can run one without us.
You keep the method, the templates, and the facilitation guide.Bring one to your institution
Rehearse it before it’s real.
Tell us the audience — a desk, a delegation, a cohort — and the decision you want them to be ready for. We’ll propose a scenario, neutral and sourced, usually within two business days.
Email the lab →Or sponsor one for others
A line we keep in writing
Diplo Space, Inc. is a neutral, 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.