Dependency killed the old debate. Sovereignty is the new one, and Europe hasn’t agreed what it means.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

A single shutoff order, briefly contemplated in early 2025 and never fully executed, ended a debate Europe had been having for a decade. The question of whether European defense space should rely on a U.S. commercial provider, Starlink in the prime example, Viasat KA-SAT before it, is no longer a question. The Day 1 program at SmallSat Europe 2026 settled it across both stages with unusual unanimity. Single-source dependency is the strategic risk Europe is now organizing around. “Dual-use” is no longer the operative category.

The replacement frame is technological sovereignty. The harder problem, surfaced repeatedly through the day and never fully resolved, is that “technological sovereignty” was used by serious people to describe four different things, and Europe has roughly eighteen months to converge on a single working definition before its sovereign-space programs lock in the ambiguity at the architecture stage.

The dependency evidence

The case is straightforward. Tens of thousands of Starlink terminals have been the operational backbone of Ukrainian frontline communications since 2022. A brief 2025 suspension of U.S. intelligence support, even partial and short-lived, was sufficient to demonstrate the exposure. “Dependency kills,” said Tim Sweijs of The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, naming single billionaires, single companies, single states, and single contracts as the relevant forms.

The February 2022 Viasat KA-SAT cyberattack at the start of the Russian invasion is the canonical case in the other direction: a commercial provider, a sovereign customer, a critical service taken offline by a near-peer adversary in the opening hours of a major war. “It proved that one source of data is not enough,” POLSA’s Col. Marcin Mazur told the Dual-Use panel.

That is not an abstract risk profile. It is the operating environment European defense planners now have to assume.

The architectural response is converging. Commercial-as-backbone has been replaced by military-capabilities-as-backbone with commercial-as-complement. SATCOMBw Stage 4 is Germany’s implementation. IRIS² is the EU-level implementation. Poland’s expanded ESA contribution diversifies further. NATO’s Commercial Space Strategy provides the framework basis. Germany will field offensive space capabilities to deter aggression on its own systems, with one declared constraint from the Day 1 keynote: “There is only one red line we defined. We will not produce debris.”

Four definitions of sovereignty, one unresolved problem

What is in dispute is what sovereignty actually means when it has to be specified into a procurement document.

The first definition is positional. Own the technology the rest of the global supply chain cannot route around, ASML in semiconductors by analogy, and the country owning it becomes structurally relevant. “If you’re not at the table, you’re probably at the menu,” TNO’s Kees Buijsrogge put it. Sovereignty as supply-chain leverage.

The second is industrial-policy allocation. No single European country, with the partial exception of Germany, has the budget to be sovereign on everything. Sovereignty therefore has to be distributed across member states by deliberate industrial policy. “Every country can decide to invest in some technologies. But not in everything,” SITAEL’s Chiara Pertosa argued. “So it’s a question of industrial politics.” France is sovereign on launch. Germany on certain payloads. Italy on others. Coordination becomes the moat.

The third is architectural. Sovereignty as configurable boundary inside the satellite system: multi-purpose constellation hardware, sovereign data routing through isolated paths, hosted-payload options, customer-operated dedicated constellations. The hardware is shared. The data flow is sovereign.

The fourth is data-source diversification. Sovereignty as never depending on a single provider for the inputs that matter. Multiple commercial radar suppliers, your own electro-optical sensors, multiple national contributions to multinational constellations.

All four are defensible. None of them are the same. And then there is the additional position, drawn most starkly from Germany: “We should not do it the Chinese way and improperly mix between civilian and defense use cases,” Maj. Gen. Wolfgang Ohl told the room. “Transferring these technologies into actual military operations and applications has to be left to sovereign national programs.”

The legal architecture inside the ambiguity

The reason this matters operationally is that the EU Space Act is hardening toward a 2030 effective date, with European Parliament amendments filed in March 2026. The same Act either consolidates the thirteen national space regimes into a single market or adds a fourteenth regulatory layer on top of them, and the answer turns partly on which definition of sovereignty wins.

Worse, the Russian position, already articulated at the U.N., is that any commercial satellite supporting military operations becomes a legitimate target by function. “If a commercial satellite provides some support for the military, its neutralization might offer military advantage,” RAND’s Khrystyna Holynska said of the position Europe should expect to encounter. Europe’s sovereignty definition is therefore not only an industrial-policy question. It is also the doctrinal frame under which European commercial assets will be classified, attacked, or defended.

The verdict from Day 1

The dependency lesson is settled. The sovereignty frame has replaced “dual-use.” The four definitions on offer cannot all be the European baseline. The procurement decisions being made in the next eighteen months, under SATCOMBw Stage 4, under IRIS², under the EU Space Act, will encode one of them by default if Europe does not pick deliberately. The honest reading of Day 1 is that Europe has the budget to be sovereign, the political alignment to want to be, and not yet a definition of the word it can operationalize across twenty-seven member states.

That is the work of 2026 and 2027. The conference made the question unavoidable. The answer is still being drawn.

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About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.