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By the SpaceNexus Desk
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Three separate decisions this week, in Paris and London, point to a pattern in how European governments are buying space capability.
France awarded a $1.7 billion contract to an Airbus-Thales team for the IRIS reconnaissance satellites. The IRIS orbiters will replace three satellites now in service, known as the Optical Space Component (CSO), with newer technology intended to deliver clearer images and faster access to captured imagery. The award keeps a core military intelligence capability inside a European industrial base.
France also approved Globalstar to launch and operate 54 next-generation direct-to-device satellites under a 20-year spectrum license, as reported by SpaceNews and SatNews. Separately, MDA Space says the first eight satellites it delivered for Globalstar's 2-R mission passed initial in-orbit functional tests, nearly three months after their August 15 launch.
In the United Kingdom, a possible Lockheed Martin win in the £2.4 billion Skynet military satellite communications competition is driving a political argument about domestic manufacturing, British jobs and defense industrial ties. A companion analysis, "Securing the Orbital Flank," describes how Skynet, satellite navigation and NATO surveillance programs link orbital assets to ground infrastructure and military users.
Other items in the window reinforce the theme. Qatar's Es'hailSat signed an MoU with the Qatar Mobility Innovations Center on AI. Rivada Space Networks partnered with Telespazio Brasil for Latin American services on its planned 600-satellite constellation. Japan's post-ISS framework envisages JAXA buying services from commercial providers. The common thread is governments deciding whether to own, license or purchase space capability.
This piece projects forward from those decisions. The projections are analytic extrapolations, not reported facts, and are labeled as such.
Sources:
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Space programs lock in suppliers for a decade or more. A 20-year spectrum license is an obvious example, but so are reconnaissance satellites designed for roughly a decade of operations and communications satellites that anchor defense networks for similar periods. When Paris awards IRIS to Airbus and Thales or London debates whether Skynet should go to a US prime, they are choosing the industrial structure of the 2030s.
The UK debate shows the trade-off clearly. A foreign supplier may offer a capable, lower-risk solution, but domestic manufacturing carries political value, employment and control over sensitive technology. France's approach with IRIS is the opposite choice: keep the work within a European team. The Globalstar license is a third model: regulate a foreign-linked operator on French terms, setting conditions through spectrum rather than ownership.
The risk of dependence is also fresh in the industry's mind. Recent coverage of Starlink's service being cut for Ukrainian forces, and of the new NRO cyber office, has made the point that reliance on a single commercial provider can become a strategic vulnerability. European decision-makers read these stories as arguments for diversified, sovereign capacity.
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The IRIS award replaces three CSO satellites at roughly $1.7 billion, which implies a program value of around $550 million per replaced satellite when averaged, though the contract may include ground segment and services. If France and its partners sustain this replacement rhythm, a reasonable expectation is that by 2035 IRIS-class satellites will be in service and a successor planning cycle will be underway. The market for European optical government imaging is thus likely to stay in the low billions of dollars per generation rather than expand dramatically, unless commercial imagery gets integrated into the architecture.
That integration is the key variable. Commercial operators, including radar providers such as ICEYE and Synspective, already provide frequent revisit imagery. A plausible trajectory by 2035 is a hybrid model in which sovereign satellites cover the highest-priority collection while commercial data supplies volume. The earlier coverage of seven-minute imagery latency suggests the technical pressure is already moving in that direction.
The Airbus-Thales team is the template for French sovereign programs. If Skynet's decision goes to Lockheed Martin, it would be a notable exception to the pattern of domestic or European leadership, and the political fight suggests the outcome will carry consequences. By 2035, we can project two scenarios:
The truth will likely sit between them, and the Skynet decision is the nearest indicator. The £2.4 billion value makes it one of the larger single awards in the region this decade.
France's 20-year license for 54 Globalstar satellites is a long horizon for a technology that is only starting to commercialize. Between now and 2035, expect more countries to license D2D service on terms that specify service areas, interconnection with local carriers and security obligations. Japan's selection of Rakuten's proposal and the AST SpaceMobile joint venture, covered earlier, shows the same dynamic in Asia.
A realistic metric for 2035: multiple national D2D licenses of 15-20 years in duration across Europe and Asia, with at least three competing constellations (Starlink Mobile, AST SpaceMobile, and Globalstar with its Amazon relationship) operating in overlapping markets. AST said this week that it has too few satellites for beta service this year and that its 2027 outlook is uncertain, which is a reminder that deployment timelines in this sector slip frequently. Any projection should assume delays of a year or more are normal.
Europe's sovereign ambitions in satellites depend on launch. The Pentagon has started financing alternative US launch providers because of concerns about Falcon's future, and Isar Aerospace has stated an ambition to rival SpaceX. For 2035, a plausible outcome is that Europe has at least two operational domestic commercial launchers in service, but the continent still relies on non-European vehicles for a significant fraction of heavy payloads. Quilty's projected shortfall of 150 launches through 2030 suggests that capacity will be tight for most of the intervening period.
NASA's selection of Viasat, SES and Astranis for up to $1.07 billion in commercial Ka-band relay concepts, and Japan's framework for buying commercial station services, indicate that governments are moving from owning infrastructure to buying services. By 2035, European defense communications may follow this pattern in some segments, with sovereign payloads for the most sensitive traffic and commercial capacity for the rest. The expected metric is a higher share of government satellite communications spending flowing to service contracts than today, though precise figures are not available in the current sources.
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