Dual-Use by Design: The Legal Status of Foreign-Operated Space Tracking Stations on African Soil

Within the past half a decade the People’s Republic of China built or expanded satellite tracking, telemetry and data-receiving stations in Egypt, Ethiopia and Namibia. Several of them operated by entities directly linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). These facilities sits on African soil, under African territorial sovereignty, yet their military significance, and in one documented case their direct chain of command is to a PLA tracking department. This is scarcely administered by the host state’s domestic law or by the international space treaties the host state has ratified. In this article, the authors ask what legal status these dual-use ground stations hold, what obligations, if any; they place on the states that host them? What happens when the dependency runs the other way, as it now does with Nigeria’s own national satellite? The article adopts a doctrinal and casestudy methodology. It analyses the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the Registration Convention 1975, the customary international law of due diligence, and the emerging Woomera Manual restatement of military space law, against four empirical case studies. China’s tracking stations in Egypt, Ethiopia and Namibia, documented in a January 2026 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Hidden Reach investigation, and the ongoing crisis surrounding Nigeria’s NigComSat-1R satellite. This Satellite has its operational control exercised from a Chinese ground station in Kashi, Xinjiang, since 2018. The article finds that the existing legal framework is fragmented. Space law regulates state responsibility and the jurisdiction of registered space objects, while telecommunications law regulates the radio-frequency and earth-station components. Neither body of law provides detailed rules for foreign-operated ground stations. Furthermore, the international space treaty regime was drafted almost entirely around the regulation of space objects in orbit and says remarkably little about the terrestrial ground segment that makes orbital activity possible at all. Ground stations are not space objects within the meaning of the Registration Convention, and Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty’s peaceful-purposes clause restricts only weapons of mass destruction and military installations on celestial bodies. This leaves Earth-based dual-use tracking infrastructure almost entirely outside the treaty framework and governed instead by ordinary rules of territorial sovereignty and whatever bilateral memorandum of understanding the host state agreed to. Namibia’s own arrangement for its Windhoek and Swakopmund stations illustrates how little domestic legal scrutiny such agreements currently receive. Nigeria’s experience with NigComSat-1R shows that the dependency this creates is not one-directional. An African state can as easily lose effective control of its own space asset to a foreign ground station as it can unknowingly host one. The article accordingly recommends three concrete fixes, each targeted at a specific failure identified in the analysis. First, African states should require foreign-built tracking stations to undergo a mandatory dual-use risk assessment and disclose their operational control arrangements before approval. This should be so in case a host government can no longer authorise a facility, as Namibia did at Windhoek, without ever being told whether it is civilian infrastructure or a node in a foreign military command network. Secondly, any state-owned satellite should be legally required to maintain a redundant, domestically controlled backup ground station, so that an accident of the kind that struck Nigeria’s Abuja facility in 2019 cannot again leave a country unable to command its own satellite for want of a working alternative at home. Third, the African Union should negotiate a coordinated continental position within the Woomera Manual and MILAMOS processes on ground-segment jurisdiction, so that the rules eventually governing this infrastructure are shaped with African bargaining power behind them, rather than settled elsewhere and presented to African states afterward as a fait accompli.

Keywords: space law; space tracking station; ground segment; dual-use infrastructure; China; military-civil fusion; Namibia; Ethiopia; Egypt; Nigeria; NigComSat; sovereignty