Europe wants to take back control of its satellite space

The European Union has never talked so much about space sovereignty, and its proposal to reserve part of the satellite spectrum for European operators marks a shift in doctrine.

Long focused on access to space, Europe is now looking to control the orbital infrastructure that will carry communications, data, and a growing share of the digital economy.

SpaceX’s reaction shows that the stakes go well beyond a question of radio spectrum. Behind the battle over the 2 GHz band lies a broader fight over who controls the future digital highways of the world.

When the European Commission proposed, this spring, reserving part of that frequency band for European satellite operators, the move looked like just another regulatory tweak. A few weeks later, SpaceX formally objected to the plan with European authorities, arguing it risked slowing the development of direct-to-smartphone satellite services and could create interference affecting certain critical services.

The intensity of the American reaction reveals just how significant the issue is, because behind the technical debate over frequencies lies a new reality: space is becoming an essential layer of the global digital economy, and Europe no longer wants to depend exclusively on foreign players to make use of it.

Starlink turned the satellite into strategic infrastructure

Until recently, space power was measured by the ability to launch rockets, put satellites into orbit, or run scientific missions.

With several thousand satellites in low orbit and millions of users across dozens of countries, SpaceX has shown that a constellation can become a global digital infrastructure. A satellite is no longer just a communication or observation tool — it’s becoming a network.

This shift took on a particular significance with the war in Ukraine. When ground infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, Starlink provided a continuity of service that few other players could match. Military, government, and civilian communications came to rely, in part, on a network controlled by a private American company.

That was a wake-up call in several European capitals: for the first time, digital infrastructure essential to a European state’s functioning in wartime depended directly on the decisions of a foreign company.

The issue then became eminently political.

A dependency reminiscent of the cloud

This realization comes as the European Union is already trying to reduce several dependencies it considers strategic.

The debate over semiconductors led to the Chips Act; the one over cloud computing has fed discussions around sovereign infrastructure. Artificial intelligence now raises the same questions when it comes to models, data centers, and data.

Space is now joining that list. For Brussels, the question isn’t whether SpaceX is a reliable partner today, but whether Europe wants its future critical infrastructure to rest mainly on players whose decision-making centers sit in Washington or California.

That question becomes all the more important as satellite constellations no longer serve merely to provide connectivity in remote areas. They now carry industrial data, government communications, defense applications, emergency services, and, in the future, part of the traffic between connected devices, autonomous vehicles, and distributed AI systems.

As this orbital layer grows in importance, dependency on it becomes, de facto, a matter of sovereignty.

The frequency battle masks an industrial one

The current controversy is officially about the 2 GHz band, a frequency that’s particularly strategic for developing so-called direct-to-device services, which let a smartphone communicate directly with a satellite without going through traditional ground infrastructure.

For industry players, this is one of the most promising markets of the coming decade — the ability to connect billions of devices directly to satellite constellations could reshape a significant part of the global telecommunications market.

Europe knows it can’t replicate, in just a few years, the lead SpaceX has built up, so it wants to act on access to the European market instead.

The logic is similar to what’s been seen in semiconductors or in certain energy industrial policies. It’s not just about protecting existing players — it’s about creating the conditions for future European champions to emerge.

That approach is exactly what SpaceX criticizes when it argues that the European proposal favors operators based on their country of origin rather than economic or technical considerations.

For the Commission, by contrast, this is a legitimate tool of industrial sovereignty.

IRIS² looms behind this battle

The debate over frequencies can’t be understood separately from Europe’s space ambitions.

The European Union launched the IRIS² program with the goal of having a constellation capable of providing secure communications to member states, government administrations, critical operators, and businesses. The project aims to secure sovereign capability in a field that has become strategic.

But to exist for the long haul, a European constellation will need a solid industrial ecosystem, competitive operators, and a market attractive enough to justify the necessary investment.

The decisions being made today on frequencies are directly shaping that environment.

The battle over the 2 GHz band is probably only the first visible chapter of this transformation. A response from Washington likely won’t be long in coming, and could include reciprocity measures if Europe favors its own operators too heavily. A new front in the battle for sovereignty is opening up in space tech.