A natural hub country in the Mediterranean for submarine cables and equipped with a complete and technologically advanced space supply chain, our nation can position itself as a laboratory for integration between the Blue economy and the Space economy, enhancing the sea–space–data continuum as a lever of systemic resilience, industrial competitiveness, and capital attraction.
In the 21st century, power is no longer exercised exclusively through the control of territories, maritime routes, or traditional energy resources, but is increasingly manifested along “invisible infrastructures” that are ever more strategic. Among these, submarine cables and satellite networks stand out above all. These backbones of global connectivity today constitute the material skeleton of digital globalization along which data, capital, institutional communications, financial transactions, and functions essential for national security flow. More than 95% of global digital communications travel on cables laid on the ocean floor, while satellite constellations — particularly in low Earth orbit (LEO) — ensure global coverage, operational continuity, and resilience in the event of crises, conflicts, or sabotage. If cables ensure transmission capacity and low latency, satellites provide redundancy, flexibility, and strategic autonomy: together, therefore, they configure a single inter-domain infrastructure that integrates sea, space, and cyberspace into an increasingly interconnected and inseparable functional continuum.
This integration has transformed submarine cables and satellites into geoeconomic assets of primary importance. They are no longer merely technical infrastructures, but levers of structural power, whose control directly affects information flows, financial markets, economic stability, and the decision-making capacity of individual states. The vulnerabilities of such infrastructures are no longer theoretical hypotheses: disruptions, attacks, or interference are capable of producing immediate effects on GDP, the cost of capital, investor confidence, and the continuity of public and private functions, configuring high-impact systemic risks that are already being priced in by financial markets.
The international legal framework, however, appears increasingly inadequate to govern this new reality. The regulatory regimes that govern the high seas, starting with the 1982 Montego Bay Convention, and outer space, founded on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, were conceived in an era in which such infrastructures did not have their current economic-financial and strategic centrality. The regulatory compartmentalization between separate domains now clashes with the hybrid and integrated nature of the infrastructures that cross them, generating a systemic vulnerability that contemporary geopolitical competition tends to exploit.
It is therefore not surprising that global competition is already structuring itself around these networks. The United States maintains a dominant position both in the cable sector, thanks to major digital operators, and in commercial satellite constellations; China is developing an integrated sea–space approach as an instrument of global strategic projection; the European Union, aware of its vulnerabilities, has launched targeted initiatives ranging from the 2023 Space Strategy for Security and Defence to the strengthening of submarine cable security, up to mechanisms for screening foreign investments in critical infrastructure. In this context, the concepts of strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty are emerging strongly as new categories not only geopolitical but also geoeconomic, understood not as autarky but as the capacity to design, protect, and govern critical infrastructures in an autonomous and cooperative way, reducing strategic dependencies and systemic and economic risks.
In this scenario, Italy occupies a peculiar and potentially distinctive position. A natural hub country in the Mediterranean for submarine cables and equipped with a complete and technologically advanced space supply chain, our nation can position itself as a laboratory for integration between the Blue economy and the Space economy, enhancing the sea–space–data continuum as a lever of systemic resilience, industrial competitiveness, and capital attraction. In this perspective lies the action of the Italian Space Agency, which has recently established the Space and Blue task force, aimed at promoting an interdisciplinary and inter-domain approach between space and marine technologies. The objective of the initiative is to contribute to the construction of an integrated technological ecosystem capable of enabling hybrid infrastructures, supporting dual-use industrial supply chains, fostering the growth of innovative startups and SMEs, and strengthening the security of critical infrastructures and information flows in the space–sea inter-domain.
The thematic lines of the Space and Blue initiative, whose multi-thematic calls for proposals will be launched shortly, cover areas of high strategic and technological value, specifically: sensing, environmental and infrastructural monitoring; robotics and artificial intelligence applied to systems operating in hostile environments; energy and propulsion technologies, with potential cross-sector spillovers between sea and space; up to quantum communications, cybersecurity, and the protection of digital and inter-domain critical infrastructures.
Within this framework, the recent establishment of the Agency for the Security of Underwater Activities (ASAS), enacted by Law No. 9/2026, opens further significant spaces for institutional and operational synergy. In this sense, the integration between the competences of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in the space domain and those of the National Underwater Hub (PNS) and, in a future perspective, ASAS in the underwater domain — together with other competent institutional actors — could foster coordinated governance of inter-domain critical infrastructures (space–sea–underwater), strengthening the national capacity for prevention, monitoring, and response to systemic risks affecting seabeds and orbits.
The convergence between these dimensions could therefore make it possible to more effectively support the transfer of technology from research to industry, creating the conditions for the national production system to fully seize the opportunities offered by the two major emerging economies of space and sea, in a logic of strategic autonomy, integrated security, and long-term economic-financial sustainability.
