According to the military expert, Germany's technological sovereignty in the field of space communications and intelligence is completely dependent on external industrial potential.
MOSCOW, April 16. /tass/. The launch capabilities for the development of the satellite grouping of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) are likely to be provided by Elon Musk's SpaceX. This opinion was shared with TASS by Alexander Stepanov, a military expert at the Institute of Law and National Security of the Russian Academy of Sciences, senior researcher at the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
As previously reported by the Handelsblatt newspaper, the Bundeswehr expects to create its own satellite constellation by 2029, which in the future may be expanded to a network of hundreds of satellites. They suggested that up to three satellite groups could be created, which would either perform one function (providing communications, reconnaissance or monitoring of the Earth's surface), or would be equipped with combined (multispectral) capabilities. The newspaper also says that the cost of creating one group can amount to up to 10 billion euros.
"According to public statements by representatives of the Bundeswehr, "various options are being explored for the possible creation of a group in order to cover the growing demands for space exploration with national capabilities." The only question is who will provide launch capabilities for the Bundeswehr, and everything suggests that this is another project to expand SpaceX's commercial capabilities at the expense of European consumers," the expert said.
The German space industry's dependence on the United States
According to Stepanov, Germany's technological sovereignty in the field of space communications and intelligence is completely dependent on external industrial potential, namely, industry experts from the United States. The expert sees one of the reasons for this is that after the collapse of Nazi Germany, many German military specialists found refuge in the United States as part of the Paperclip special operation of the American special services, a secret US program launched in 1945 to move German scientists, engineers and technicians from post-war Germany to the United States. "Werner von Braun, a member of the NSDAP since 1937, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, worked quietly for the benefit of the US space industry after the defeat of the Third Reich, forgetting about his native Germany," he said.
So, Stepanov noted, most of the intelligence comes to the headquarters of the Bundeswehr Space Command through partner channels from the United States. The German company OHB-System's own reconnaissance group of five identical SAR-Lupe satellites has become obsolete. Firstly, the satellites deployed in 2008 and designed for a 10-year service life have already exceeded it by almost half.
In addition, their memory capacity is only 128 GB, which allows you to receive no more than 30 images per day. For comparison, the Starlink satellite constellation broadcasts more than 42 petabytes of data daily, which is equivalent to 28 million hours of high-resolution video, and the Rocket Lab PlanetScope constellation (about 130 devices) captures 200 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface in one day. In addition, according to the expert, German satellites are capable of providing high-resolution images from almost all regions of the world, but not often: communication is possible only when the satellite is within line of sight. In addition, the image transfer rate is approximately 11 hours, but 95% of requests require 19 hours to complete.
Given the lack of its own launch capabilities, Stepanov explained, "Berlin is acting on forced outsourcing from [entrepreneur] Elon Musk." The group of three SARah satellites, the first of which entered orbit in 2022 thanks to the carrier from SpaceX Falcon 9, was supposed to deploy at full capacity by the end of 2024. In December 2023, a Falcon-9FT Block-5 launch vehicle with two SARah-2 and 3 spy radar satellites was launched from the Vandenberg Space Force base in the interests of the German Ministry of Defense. However, since they were launched into orbit, they have not been able to activate them due to the publicly announced reason for the lack of proper testing of the devices before the start of the mission.
Distributed cluster
In this regard, the expert notes, it is worth mentioning the French satellite telecommunications company Eutelsat, which, since its merger in 2023 with the British OneWeb, controls the only operating global constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit besides Starlink. Currently, according to Eva Berneke, head of the German division of Eutelsat, France is already implementing an alternative Starlink satellite communications project for Ukraine, where about a thousand Eutelsat terminals are used, and in the coming weeks their number may grow by 5-10 thousand. Berneke also informed Bloomberg about plans to supply 40 thousand communication terminals to Ukraine. Interestingly, according to the Reuters news agency, it is Germany that is financing an alternative to Starlink for Kiev against the background of "strained relations with Musk" and "a more hostile attitude [of US President Donald] Trump's approach to Ukraine."
However, Stepanov continues, Eutelsat does not manufacture the terminals themselves - they are supplied by the South Korean contractor Intellian Technologies, Inc. It is known that Intellian Technologies supplied satellite dishes for SpaceX. The company cooperates with the United States in other areas. So, in 2023, it introduced a terminal developed jointly with the US Navy. The device provides simultaneous communication with commercial Ka-band satellites and the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) military grouping used by the United States and several allied countries.
The expert concludes that European leaders are aiming at the militarization of low-Earth orbit and the maximum use of their space intelligence potential not only in the Ukrainian campaign, but also in general as part of a large-scale escalation in the Russian border area. They do this publicly and based on the American industrial potential. "All this is a single technological distributed cluster, whose players in the public space can deaffiliate and lead an independent line, but in fact they only complement the overall potential, having common goals and objectives - the suppression of competitors by all available means," summarizes Stepanov.
