Three hundred miles above our heads, a chase is in progress. A reconnaissance satellite called ICEYE-X36, made in Finland, is being pursued by a Russian satellite; the two craft are moving at almost five miles per second. The Finnish craft weighs 90kg and looks, to the untrained eye, like a dishwasher attached to a shiny fence. It can see through clouds, and the data it produces is used by the Ukrainian military. Last week, the Russian satellite Kosmos-2612 began to close in on it. First, it approached within a few hundred miles, then a few hundred metres; on 18 October, it is estimated that it may have come as close as 26 metres. The Russians may be trying to intercept communications, or they may just be preparing to cause a crash that takes out a piece of infrastructure useful to Ukraine’s defence. Or, as with the Russian ships that loiter near undersea cables, they may simply be demonstrating a threat, because they can. Back on Earth, on parliament’s Committee Corridor, experts from the space industry are preparing to present MPs and peers with a new item on the list of frightening things they probably can’t do anything about. The space geeks seem out of place in the long, gloomily panelled corridor, with its heavy oak doors and carpet that seems transplanted from an elderly Wetherspoons; they are scientists in a lawyers’ domain. Some of them seem to know each other. “Fancy seeing you here,” they say, as they wait to be summoned by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. Europe and the UK have belatedly woken up to the fact that we need our own satellites, writes @willydunn: newstatesman.com/politics/th…