Optical Communications

Sovereign Space Capability Is Starting to Look Like Signed Contracts and Flown Hardware

OHB signed a contract worth nearly €1 billion with SES this week to build 18 medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) satellite platforms under Europe’s IRIS² secure-connectivity programme (details via SpaceWatch ). Within days, China demonstrated a two-way, high-speed laser communications link stretching more than 400,000 kilometres between Earth and the Moon (as SpaceWatch reported ). Different continents, different technologies, and neither story is a strategy paper: “strategic autonomy” is no longer a phrase that lives in government white papers. It’s a line item, a delivery schedule, and, in one case, a beam of light that actually made the round trip.