The Great Satellite Decoupling

When Washington severed Ukraine’s access to the Maxar-run GEGD satellite feed in March 2025, the move functioned as a global wake-up call. By demonstrating that an intelligence lifeline could be toggled off like a subscription, the U.S. inadvertently triggered a frantic, 55-nation scramble toward autonomous space-defense capabilities.

Editorial·September 23, 2026·reads: 185

Pacôme Révillon, chief executive of Novaspace, confirmed the scale of this shift at a recent Paris security summit. Projections indicate that defense-owned reconnaissance satellites launched globally between 2026 and 2035 will reach 2,306, a staggering leap from the 485 launched in the preceding decade. The message from the summit was clear: sovereign space control has replaced reliance on American infrastructure.

Poland’s recent announcement of its own satellite constellation, dubbed "Polish Starlink," serves as a bellwether for this trend. Governments are no longer waiting for Washington to mediate their intelligence needs. The rapid proliferation of dedicated space-defense budgets across 55 nations suggests that the strategic monopoly once held by the U.S. is fracturing under the weight of its own policy experiments.