EU now has its own ‘secure and encrypted’ satellite communication system, Kubilius says

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/27/eu-now-has-its-own-secure-and-encrypted-satellite-communication-system-kubilius-says

15 Comments

  1. supercyberlurker on

    >These efforts are all part of plans to reduce the EU’s dependence on foreign space services, such as Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk. They also go hand-in-hand with the EU’s efforts to bolster the bloc’s defence capabilities and readiness

    Yup.

  2. Please also do social media guys. I might be rough on you EU peeps it’s all love and potential. You guys with the help of other can stabilize the world again.

  3. MystikTrailblazer on

    I hope the EU doesn’t find itself on a similar oligarchy path as the US is in, and with its own Elon Musk type of BS in a few years.

    And God I hope the US (my country) can get a good portion of its population’s head out of their 🫏 and course correct, including strengthening institutions to prevent another tyrannical administration from taking over, while clipping the wings of oligarchs like Musk.

  4. They also want chat control and back doors to encrypted messaging apps, etc.. So good for the government but not for the citizens.

  5. No doubt the current US administration will whine about “national security” and demand access.

  6. joepublicschmoe on

    For those who are not well-versed with how satellite communications works, this EU system is the old traditional geosynchronous satellites, where the commsat is in an orbit that goes around the Earth once per day, so the satellite appears to be in a fixed spot in the sky.

    This traditional commsat system’s biggest limitation is the latency (the lag). Because geostationary orbit is VERY far away at 35,786km, it takes over a second for a radio signal to travel from the sender to the satellite then to the receiver.

    Starlink is the newer low-earth-orbit satcom technology where the satellite is just 500km away, so the signal from sender to satellite to receiver is near-instantaneous. The tradeoff is that you need a lot of satellites (thousands) to make this work, since low-earth orbit satellites pass overhead in minutes rather than stay fixed in a spot in the sky.

    Europe badly needs a sovereign LEO broadband satellite network. But unfortunately they don’t have the means to deploy thousands of satellites inexpensively to make this happen– To do that, Europe needs a reusable orbital rocket like the Falcon 9 SpaceX used to deploy Starlink, but Europe has been shortsighted in dismissing reusable rockets and instead spent a few billion euros to develop the non-reusable Ariane 6.

    The EU proposed a sovereign LEO broadband network called IRIS^2 but absent a low-cost reusable rocket system to deploy it, it might be a decade or decades before that network becomes reality.