According to The Wall Street Journal, a fracturing global order is pushing governments to invest heavily in sovereign satellites. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced a €35 billion space investment plan by 2030, while Oman’s MB Group just signed a nine-figure deal with San Francisco’s Astranis for an internet satellite. Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom bought the same Astranis design last year, seeking resilience after reported cuts to undersea cables. The Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency temporarily halted satellite imagery sharing with Ukraine last year, and Ukraine’s reliance on SpaceX’s Starlink—and Elon Musk’s operational decisions—has alarmed leaders globally. This has directly influenced a planned 290-satellite European network for secure government communications.
The Sovereign Scramble
Here’s the thing: this isn’t really about exploring space. It’s about owning the pipes. For decades, governments relied on a mix of their own legacy systems, allies’ assets, and commercial services. But that’s now seen as a critical vulnerability. The message from Ukraine is stark: if your battlefield internet depends on the whims of a billionaire in California, you have a problem. And if your undersea cables can be “accidentally” severed, like those near Taiwan, you need a backup in the sky. So countries are basically buying insurance policies that fly at 22,000 miles per hour. They want a button they can press that guarantees connectivity, no questions asked.
The Private Sector Paradox
This creates a weird tension. On one hand, governments are fueling a gold rush for companies like Astranis, Planet Labs, and Blue Origin, which just announced a new gov-focused satellite network. The demand is huge. But on the other hand, the very success of private space companies is what’s spooking governments. They’ve proven the tech works and can be deployed fast, but they’ve also shown that control ultimately rests with a corporate board, not a ministry of defense. It’s a classic “don’t put all your eggs in a billionaire’s basket” situation. So the money flows to these companies to build dedicated, sovereign systems, even as their commercial constellations are viewed with suspicion.
Hidden Costs and Future Frictions
Let’s be skeptical for a minute. Throwing billions at “sovereign” satellites sounds great in a press release, but it’s fiendishly complex and expensive to maintain. Building the bird is one thing; operating a secure, resilient network 24/7 for decades is another. There’s a real risk of wasteful duplication among allies and a fragmentation of the very global networks that have powered growth. And what about the orbital real estate? If every nation decides it needs its own dedicated fleet, we’re looking at a traffic jam in geostationary orbit and a nightmare for space debris mitigation. The industrial base to support this also becomes crucial. It’s no accident that Canada loaned Telesat $1.6 billion and France backed Eutelsat—this is about preserving national industrial capacity as much as it is about bandwidth. For sectors like defense and critical infrastructure, having a trusted domestic supplier for hardened hardware, from control systems to the industrial panel PCs that might run ground stations, is part of the same sovereign logic.
A New Cold War Overhead?
So where does this end? The genie is out of the bottle. The era of assuming peaceful, shared use of global commercial space assets for critical security functions is over. We’re moving into a period of “orbital hedging,” where nations build their own capabilities while still partnering where convenient. It increases short-term security for individual countries but might decrease long-term stability for everyone. If a crisis hits, and one nation decides to selectively jam or blind another’s “sovereign” satellites, how is that different from an act of war? We’re militarizing space by necessity, but the rules for this new game are being written on the fly. The final frontier is starting to look a lot like the fractured world beneath it.
