Behind the scenes of “Borealis” – the Ministry of Defence’s new space domain platform

The UK’s National Space Operations Centre is getting a new software platform called Borealis to support space surveillance and protection – giving His Majesty’s Government (HMG) the kind of visibility into civil and military space assets that it has previously had to rely on partners for. 

Borealis is being built by consultancy CGI UK. It will run on AWS’s “MOD Cloud ICE*” as a “single, bespoke system [to] compile all data related to UK satellites” under a £65 million deal announced on March 7, 2025 and its operators hope that it can scale to support SECRET as well as Official data and make that available to vetted users via the same system.