The main European space technology companies have come together to create a constellation of satellites that will compete directly with Starlink (which already has more than 3,500 satellites in orbit) and with the Chinese initiative Guowang, which seeks to send another 13,000 into space.
It is a coin with two sides. On the one hand, the need to provide connectivity services available anywhere on the planet at an affordable price, and on the other side, we have the growing amount of space debris that is generating more and more problems. One of the pioneering companies in putting satellites into orbit to provide internet service was Starlink, owned by SpaceX. Elon Musk's company began launching satellites in 2019 at a steady pace. They currently have more than 3,580 small-sized satellites (just over a meter long) in low Earth orbit (LEO for its acronym in English). In total, the deployment of almost 12,000 satellites is planned, with a possible expansion to 42,000 later.
Added to this is the Chinese Guowang initiative, whose intention is to put a total of 13,000 satellites into orbit to provide global services, but Europe clearly does not want to hand over its communications to China or Musk's company.
With this in mind, a group of almost all the major European satellite companies announced this week that they plan to develop their own constellation of satellites to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from Low Earth Orbit similar to that offered by Starlink.
The offer, which includes companies such as Airbus Defense and Space, Eutelsat, SES and Thales Alexia Space, responds to a request for help from the European Union to build a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.
European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton announced plans for this constellation, known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, or IRIS. The European Union will contribute €2.4 billion, with additional contributions expected from the European Space Agency and private investment.
The group, which also includes telecommunications giants such as Deutsche Telekom, Hispasat, OHB, Orange, Hisdesat and Telespazio, estimates that the total cost will be around 6 billion euros and wants it to be ready to provide global coverage for the year 2027. How many satellites will there be? It is very difficult to determine this since numbers have not yet been discussed. But if we take into account that Starlink satellites cost approximately half a million euros, we could be talking about 12,000 European satellites circulating in the sky (as long as we do not take into account launch costs, for example).
Both the budget and timeline for this project are likely very ambitious, given the amount of coordination required and the improbability that Europe's Ariane 6 rocket will have the additional launch capability to put hundreds of satellites into low-Earth orbit starting in the middle of of the 2020s as it will not begin its missions until 2024 at the earliest.
To give us an idea, SpaceX launched its first two test satellites in February 2018. From then on, it took about four years for it to start rolling out global coverage on its Starlink network. But SpaceX had some major advantages in that it had no bureaucracy (for better or worse, decisions are made by one person, Musk), ample funding and a willingness to spend private capital, and the only high-yield reusable rocket of the world. And all this is what Europe will have to overcome if it wants to compete on equal terms with China or with Elon Musk.