Your report on Rheinmetall and OHB, and the “military Starlink for the Bundeswehr”, shows how secure satellite communications have become a main defence requirement. But the decisive question is not who forms a consortium; it’s whether Europe can industrialise sovereign capability fast enough to deliver it (Report, January 27).
That concern is echoed in a recent report from the European Space Policy Institute. In workshops with 33 European space-sector leaders, ESPI found that the vast majority believed Europe was lagging behind global actors, while also warning that the spending gap with the US had doubled since 2019 and continues to widen.
A military-grade LEO (low Earth orbit) network is a systems programme, including satellites, user terminals and supporting ground infrastructure produced in volume, integrated securely and sustained over years. That makes manufacturing scale and supply-chain resilience as strategically important as orbital architecture.
What’s more, performance and reliability often hinge on the unglamorous yet critical hardware. Think electromagnetic shielding, filters, precision interconnects and other tight-tolerance components that enable dense electronics to operate predictably in contested environments. These are also the parts that can constrain schedules if capacity and qualification are not in place early.
Europe’s secure space ambitions will be realised less through announcements, and more through the industrial depth required to build and scale the enabling hardware behind them.
Ben Kitson
Head of Business Development, Precision Micro, Birmingham, UK