THE STRONGEST signals that America is turning against Ukraine have come, this month, from outer space. Ukrainian drones’ connections to Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-internet service, cut out at speeds above 160kph. Russian ballistic missiles smacked into Kyiv without the usual warnings from American spy satellites. Ukraine’s European allies reacted with deep foreboding. European defence chiefs can offer Ukraine only partial substitutes for American intelligence and communications networks. And they worry about their own dependence on America’s space-based capabilities, about whether these will stay available if Russia attacks and about how quickly they can develop their own alternatives.
Sweden has also signed a deal to buy small spy satellites from Planet Labs, an American startup that recently opened a factory in Germany. All this is hastening efforts to develop alternatives. The European Union then moved to speed up the glacial pace of regulatory approval for merging the satellite businesses of Europe’s three largest space companies, hoping to create one big enough to compete with Mr Musk’s SpaceX. There is more encouraging news when it comes to the second area of concern, space-based ISR, mainly thanks to private European newcomers that produce small surveillance satellites much faster than legacy firms such as Airbus. It was made by Iceye, a Finnish startup that has figured out how to shrink radar satellites that were once as big as a car down to the size of a washing machine.
The day after Ukraine said restrictions had been placed on Starlink, shares in its closest European competitor, Eutelsat, surged by 23%. Admiral Anders Sundeman, the head of Sweden’s space force, says that if asked a year ago how long it would take to launch his country’s first spy satellite, he would have estimated 2030. Iceye has put 80 into orbit and plans to double its production rate to 100 next year.
And on October 19th four of the region’s largest telecommunications firms said they wanted to partner with a satellite company to compete with Starlink . “We launched it instead this year,” he says (though the launch happened on an American Falcon 9 ride-share flight).
In three crucial areas, it depends on America. The first is satellite-internet service for civilians and the armed forces. The second is space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and early warning for defence. And the third is launch capacity: the rockets and spaceports needed to put a large number of satellites into orbit. For decades, the space gap between Europe and America was widest in defence. But America also opposed Europe’s efforts to develop its own capabilities. It initially tried to block Galileo, a satellite navigation system, on the grounds that it would compete with America’s own GPS satellites, and could be used by its enemies.
America kept Europe dependent in part by letting its allies freeload on programmes such as SBIRS, an $18bn missile-warning constellation.
Yet Europe has a long way to go before it can hope to achieve “autonomy in space”, as the jargon has it.
Even setting geopolitics aside, this dependence is worrying: there is a looming shortage of capacity as SpaceX gradually retires the Falcon 9 rocket, its workhorse. Finally, none of Europe’s plans will work if it does not have enough launch capacity to put its satellites in orbit. Arianespace, a European company owned mainly by Airbus and Safran, can fly heavy payloads into orbit. But it launches far fewer rockets than SpaceX and at much higher cost, which explains why many Iceye and OneWeb satellites were carried into space by the American firm. If European countries hope to drive down the price of their rockets, they will need to commit to long-term spending plans to allow incumbents to invest, while also encouraging competition. But once they prove they can do it, they need orders. Europe’s countdown towards space autonomy will not last forever.
The European Space Agency has a €900m “launcher challenge”, which pays companies if they achieve milestones such as a successful orbital launch. “If you want your launcher to be as cheap as possible you need to launch it very regularly,” says Olivier Lemaitre, the secretary-general of Eurospace, a trade body. If demand remains small, he says, the industry will never achieve economies of scale.
