Is Europe Moving Fast Enough to Close its Space Defense Gaps?

Russia is building up its military powers, possibly aiming to attack NATO within the next four years. Europe is responding to the threat, rushing to patch its many defense gaps, including those in space. Still, Europe’s progress may be too slow to get things done in time.

Weaponry factories in Russia are running full steam, churning out tanks, artillery, missiles, and drones, intelligence reports suggest. The nation’s military bases near the eastern flank of NATO are growing, satellite images reveal, leading analysts to worry that swaths of European land along the Russian border might be at risk of becoming Ukraine-style war zones in the not so distant future.

Although countries in the region including Poland, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania have made strides, working on defenses against explosives-laden quadcopters and long-range attack drones, much slower progress is being made to ensure Europe has its own assets in space to keep its militaries connected in the case of escalation.

Ukraine’s dependence on American space technology has been widely discussed since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. It’s not just SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation, the access to which was allegedly used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations of the infamous rare minerals deal in 2025. Ukraine also depends on a constant stream of intelligence images from U.S.-controlled, commercial and governmental Earth Observation (EO) satellites, which provide near real-time insights about the moves of Russia’s troops. As things stand today, Europe is equally dependent on U.S. space tech. And although investment into space defense systems has gained momentum, things may not be moving fast enough and, in some areas, Russia and Ukraine may both be leaping ahead of Europe.

The Drone Control Problem

Aware of the vulnerability its dependency on the U.S. presents, Ukraine wants to build up its own resources in collaboration with partners in Europe to create a measure of sovereignty in space. An Earth observation constellation is being developed jointly by Ukraine and partner countries, mostly those from the former Eastern block, mostly those along the Russian border, to provide near-real time intelligence to Ukraine and its partners.

Expected to consist of “at least 32 satellites,” the constellation will use optical sensors and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations to provide images in all weather conditions and in the dark, according to Eugen Rokytsky, the head of the Ukrainian Aerospace Clusters’ Alliance, who spearheads the development. The first satellite of the constellation is expected to launch in 2027.

On top of that, Ukraine and its partner countries are planning to launch a constellation of 245 Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) internet-beaming satellites to allow Ukrainian forces to control drones without access to Starlink. The first satellite of the planned constellation, dubbed UASAT LEO, is scheduled to launch in October, according to Ukrainian satcom expert Volodymyr Stepanets.

The use of satcom to extend the range of reconnaissance and kamikaze drones and ground robots is possibly the most significant space-tech innovation that has come out of the war in Ukraine and has been solely enabled by SpaceX’s Starlink. Some 300,000 Starlink terminals are currently deployed in Ukraine, making the beleaguered country by far the largest user of Starlink services in the world, according to Stepanets. Out of that number, 100,000 terminals are used by the defense forces.

“Starlink really saved our country,” Stepanets told Via Satellite. “Starlink changed the battlefield, it changed the paradigm. Any instrument, any machine and any actor on the battlefield is now a content provider. At the same time, real-time communication provided the possibility for direct drone management.”

None of the solutions currently available in Europe, Stepanets said, can do what Starlink does. Traditional military Geostationary Orbit (GEO) satellites provide limited uplink speeds and suffer from latencies that prevent real-time control of drones and ground robots.

Eutelsat’s OneWeb constellation, the only Europe-owned LEO alternative to Starlink, has an order of magnitude lower capacity and relies on terminals that just don’t cut it for drone warfare. Even the smallest of existing OneWeb terminals weigh in excess of 10 kilograms, almost ten times as much as Starlink’s Mini terminal. While Starlink Mini costs around $450, the cheapest of existing OneWeb terminals comes at a price of more than $1,000.

Stepanets says that other, specialist European providers began making inroads into the drone satcom space, but are unable to manufacture terminals at scale and drop their prices enough to be affordable to guide one-way attack drone missions.

“Ukraine uses hundreds of deep strike drones every day,” said Stepanets. “That’s a lot of terminals.”

Nicolas Stassin, European Defence Agency’s (EDA) Project Officer for Space and Space Situational Awareness, told Via Satellite that the planned 10 billion euros ($11.5 billion) IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) LEO constellation “is expected to fulfil" the need for satcom drone control. But that constellation, to consist of 290 satellites, will not be ready to launch before 2030.

Russia, in the meantime, has already begun launching its own LEO constellation to enable drone control without access to Starlink, according to media reports. That project has probably gained urgency after SpaceX agreed to a registration scheme in Ukraine, which allows only whitelisted terminals to operate in the country.

“They have managed to put into LEO an experimental formation of small communication satellites, which they are actually already testing,” Rokytsky said. “The main purpose of this constellation is to control drones.”

According to Gunter’s Space Page, the constellation, called Rassvet, currently has three satellites in orbit. Additional 16 satellites are expected to launch in the coming months. By 2027, the constellation could grow to over 300 spacecraft.

New Paradigms for Europe

Although Europe as a whole responds to the geopolitical crisis at its traditional glacial pace, faster progress appears to be materializing on the level of individual nations.

“There’s been a worry that the collective European movement toward better space capabilities through the super-national body of the EU has been quite slow,” Luke Wyles, a space industry analyst at the Analysys Mason consultancy, tells Via Satellite. “So, individual countries are moving on their own terms and sort of propelling their own national satellite programmes, which have existed for a long time.”

In September last year, the German government announced plans to invest 35 billion euros ($40.6 billion) over the next five years into military space systems, an order of magnitude increase compared to the country’s previous space defense spending and an equivalent of the five-year budget of the entire European Space Agency.

In its 45-page Space Defence and Security Strategy, published in November last year, Germany outlined a wide range of technologies it intends to develop as well as a wider scope of international cooperation geared toward increasing Europe’s resilience and sovereignty in space.

In February, the head of German Space Command Michael Traut revealed to Reuters that Germany wants to build a secure military communication constellation of more than 100 satellites called SATCOM Stage 4. The constellation, to be developed “over the next few years,” will complement Germany’s existing duo of GEO satcom satellites of the SATCOMBw program.

France, too, boosted its space defense spending last year, albeit with a less impressive increase of 4.2 billion euros ($5 billion) for the 2026–2030 period, bringing the total planned military space budget to around 10.2 billion ($12.1 billion). France previously invested 526.4 million euros ($605 million) into OneWeb’s next generation constellation, becoming the venture’s largest stakeholder.

The U.K. is talking about “the largest sustained increase in defense spending since the end of the Cold War era” with 270 billion pounds ($359 billion) to be invested in defense over the next three years, according to a Ministry of Defence spokesperson. Around 4.2 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) will go into developing the next generation of constellation Skynet, which provides secure military communications from GEO.

Wyles says that although the increased spending in space defense technology is “a good sign,” the U.S. “spending and capability dwarfs the European position.” On top of that, he added, Europe might lack a manufacturing base to meet the challenges in time.

New Players Emerging

In the EO sector a new trend has emerged of smaller countries taking advantage of advances achieved by new space companies, acquiring assets that would previously be unavailable to them. Powering this trend is Finland-headquartered Iceye, which has expanded from a provider of SAR imagery to a manufacturer of satellites for third-party clients.

Iceye’s Senior Vice President for Missions Sales Joost Elstak, told Via Satellite that the company is now working with seven European nations including Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Portugal and Greece, who have all purchased EO satellites for their militaries over the past year.

“In our particular domain, we’re seeing a lot of countries who are fairly new to space being able to move very fast because they don’t have any legacy systems or legacy thinking on how a system should be used,” Elstak told Via Satellite. “These types of systems previously would be available maybe to the top five or top ten GDP countries in the world who could support a multi-billion euro type development for intelligence. We’re seeing now actually in Europe that the small and mid-sized countries are utilizing this capability that we’ve made available faster than some of the bigger nations.”

Iceye, which has to date launched 64 satellites in total of its own constellation and for its customers’ (they refuse to specify the size of their current fleet), advocates for a federated approach to Europe’s sovereign intelligence gathering, which could harness the faster momentum available on the national level compared to the pan-EU approach.

“There are different ways to build a big system that could support Europe,” Elstak said. “You can define it top down, set a huge requirement, and it takes years to define, to reach a compromise and build the system. But our belief is that by giving everybody a sovereign capability of a couple of satellites, we allow these systems to work together in a virtual, federated constellation, which can get you to tens or hundreds of satellites through pooling and sharing information together.”

Iceye is busy at work scaling up their manufacturing facilities to meet the expected demand.

“We’re currently ramping up to build 50 satellites this year,” Elstak said. “It will probably grow further in the future as well.”

Other European companies, especially those based in countries near the Russian border, are positioning themselves as thought-leaders, putting pressure on the European super-national structures to sort out their act and “de‑bureaucratize” their procurement processes.

“Momentum is growing across Europe, and industry already has the technological backbone to materially reduce dependencies,” Trond Hegrestad, Vice President of Small Satellites at Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, which absorbed the Lithuanian small-sat manufacturer NanoAvionics in 2022. “What we need now are predictable multi‑year programs and innovation funding, streamlined procurement and regulatory rules for cross‑border consortia, and focused investment in critical enablers such as responsive launch, resilient satellite buses and secure ground segments.”

Race to Catch Up

EDA’s Stassin said Europe is fully aware of its vulnerabilities and committed to reducing its dependency on U.S. strategic space assets by 2030.

“You do not achieve that from one day to another,” Stassin said. “But there has already been a huge amount of work undertaken on critical space technology to address those vulnerabilities, check the dependencies and close them.”

The urgency to find solutions has only increased in recent months after U.S. President Donald Trump expressed his ambition to take over Greenland from Denmark. That threat risks shattering the foundation of the NATO defense block, of which the U.S. has been the greatest guarantor for decades.

Whether the timeline of Europe’s re-arming will match that of those other players in the geopolitical arena, is a question that concerns observers. The Russian arms race certainly shows no signs of stopping.

“Europe is quite awake to what they need to do, or at least to the fact that it's quite far behind,” said Wyles. “If anything there just needs to be some continued realism about the position that we find ourselves in.”

Rokytsky added: “If we compare the analytic reports that set the timeline for a potential Russian attack [on EU] and the deployment of [Europe’s sovereign] space assets, there is definitely a mismatch. Europe has been relying too long on the strategic transatlantic partnership and the timing to close the capacity gap is too short.” VS