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By David Averre
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For much of October, Ukraine’s military found itself fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink and Starshield networks disrupted battlefield communications and rendered some of Kyiv’s most effective interceptor drones practically useless against Russian attacks.
Kyiv has learned a painful but valuable lesson: reliance on a single commercial provider, however capable or ostensibly friendly, constitutes a potentially catastrophic vulnerability. SpaceX’s technology is a key ingredient of Ukraine’s war effort, underpinning everything from front line coordination to drone warfare and air defense. Musk believes Kyiv would fall without it.
Now, Ukraine and its European allies are using his own technology to launch their escape effort.
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On October 27, Ukrainian defense tech company HIMERA and Denmark’s GomSpace announced they had successfully tested OBRIA NANO, the first satellite around which a sovereign Ukrainian communications network is to be constructed. The satellite launched on October 1 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
OBRIA NANO and the constellation Kyiv hopes will follow may never rival Starlink’s scale, but the events of the past month leave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his European counterparts no choice but to scramble for alternatives.
Controller Disconnected
Starlink is without doubt an extraordinary technological achievement. Musk’s constellation has brought reliable internet connections to the depths of the Amazon rainforest, helped Iranian dissidents circumvent Tehran’s communications blackouts, and provided Ukrainian soldiers with a vital lifeline in their existential struggle against Russian invaders.
Somewhere along the way, SpaceX established something approaching a monopoly on the kind of mobile, low-latency satellite communications modern militaries increasingly require.
America’s military-industrial complex has a long history of exploiting its technological superiority to cultivate influence over allied governments by providing military hardware, plus the spare parts and maintenance required to keep it operating, but commercial satellite communications have ushered in a new age of dependency.
Unlike a tank or artillery shell, a satellite connection is a continuously provided service. Its owner retains ultimate technical control over where, when, and how it functions. A military might purchase the terminal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it controls the network.
For years, this didn’t seem like a problem. Why would a successful company jeopardize lucrative government contracts by denying services to paying customers, particularly allies fighting a longstanding American rival?
President Donald Trump’s transformation of the trans-Atlantic relationship has revealed the flaws in that calculation. His administration has upended generations of assumptions about American commitments to European security, and made U.S. military assistance wholly conditional.
The Starlink controversy has dialed up the level of uncertainty. Just as Ukrainian drone operators discovered their equipment had ceased to function properly, governments that have poured billions into Ukraine’s defense watched in horror as their interceptor drones were rendered useless by a throttled satellite connection they couldn’t control.
Questions remain over who exactly authorized the Starlink and Starshield restrictions in Ukraine, but the conclusion is the same—critical allied military capabilities are now vulnerable to decisions made by private corporations whose relationship with the White House depends almost entirely on the state of their relationship with the man in the Oval Office.
Things need to change, and fast.
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Shopping Around
Besides a handful of small national military networks composed of single-digit numbers of satellites, Europe has only one large-scale alternative to Starlink: Eutelsat's OneWeb.
This Franco-British operation boasts a constellation of more than 600 satellites. OneWeb's spacecraft orbit around 1,200 kilometers above Earth, more than twice as high as much of Musk's hardware, and offer highly secure connectivity and bandwidth guarantees.
But OneWeb was not designed for a world in which soldiers can order drones on an online marketplace and have them delivered to the front line, much as you might order homeware from Amazon to your front door. SpaceX, meanwhile, lets a soldier buy a satellite terminal small enough to fit in a backpack, set it up in minutes, and immediately go to war.
OneWeb's terminals are heavy, difficult to transport and cost as much as $10,000. Eutelsat introduced a backpack-portable military terminal in February, but even this weighs around nine kilograms, and the service is prohibitively expensive.
The European Union's most ambitious attempt to build an alternative is IRIS², a sovereign satellite communications constellation designed to give European and friendly capitals and their militaries secure connectivity with the kind of portable, flexible service that has made Starlink indispensable.
Yet despite billions of euros in investment, the program is years away from coming online. Its budget continues to balloon as additional requirements are incorporated into the design, and the first satellites aren't expected to launch until 2029. If, not when, the full constellation of 348 satellites becomes operational online, they’ll still make up a fraction of the number of units SpaceX already has flying over our heads.
This opens the door for private companies offering bespoke products, albeit on a much smaller scale.
HIMERA and GomSpace hope OBRIA will eventually provide Ukraine with its own sovereign communications network, while Finland's ICEYE and Nokia signed an agreement with Ukraine's Defense Ministry on October 22 to explore a separate constellation. The Finnish companies expect the first satellites from their broader communications program to launch in 2028.
These projects could certainly help to diversify communications infrastructure, but that brings us to the next dependency—actually getting the satellites into space.
Europe has its own rocket launch capabilities with Ariane 6 and Vega C, and various startups have emerged with new launch vehicles to test. But the industry lags far behind SpaceX's frequency, scale, and economics; Germany's Institute for International and Security Affairs has identified dependence on American launch providers as a fundamental obstacle to European space autonomy.
So, to break free of Starlink, Europe is once again turning to its creator. On October 2, Eutelsat announced that the first 32 satellites in its OneWeb renewal program are being prepared for launch aboard a SpaceX rocket.
Adversarial Ambitions
Russian President Vladimir Putin was all too happy to give Musk his flowers this week. "Elon Musk is a genius, he’s just a real genius," he said on Wednesday—though the praise may well be little more than diplomatic biscuit buttering amid Moscow’s rapprochement with Washington.
Russia is also hard at work on a fledgling modern satellite constellation of its own. Moscow’s Starlink equivalent, known as Rassvet or "Dawn," has so far managed to put more than 30 satellites in orbit, but Ukraine is trying its best to scupper the program.
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On October 28, its Defense Intelligence Directorate published details of 49 Russian and Belarusian enterprises allegedly involved in Rassvet’s development, of which 23 reportedly remain untouched by Western sanctions. Kyiv can identify the suppliers and potentially disrupt elements of Russia’s infrastructure, but restricting the wider flow of Rassvet’s components, finance and technology will depend heavily on cooperation from the U.S. and Europe.
Only China, which is running two satellite programs concurrently, seems capable of matching the scale of Starlink any time soon.
The Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails" constellation—which has roughly 250 satellites in orbit already, with plans to scale to tens of thousands—aims to provide high-end, mass-market commercial satellite communications. The Guowang constellation, meanwhile, is designed as a national sovereign military and government comms network, and also has more than 200 spacecraft in orbit.
Obviously, neither network offers a credible communications solution for Western militaries.
For Ukraine and Europe, then, totally usurping Musk’s Starlink is impossible, at least in the short term. Rather, the task is to progressively reduce the damage that losing access to it could cause by steadily building their own alternative.
They must hope Musk remains willing to help them launch it.
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