Europe's Satellite Strategy: Own Some, Share the Rest

Europe's Satellite Strategy: Own Some, Share the Rest

When Russian hackers knocked tens of thousands of Viasat KA-SAT modems offline across Europe at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Col. Marcin Mazur of the Polish Space Agency drew a hard lesson: one source of space data is never enough. Speaking at the SmallSat Europe conference in Amsterdam on May 26, Mazur laid out the doctrine Poland is now operating under — own what you must, borrow what you can, and never trust a single point of failure again.

Poland has acted on that doctrine. The country recently acquired sovereign control over Polsaris, a synthetic aperture radar satellite built by the Finnish firm Iceye that delivers independent, all-weather, day-and-night imaging. According to Iceye, the capability bolsters not just Poland's intelligence picture but NATO's as a whole. Yet Mazur was clear that national ownership is only part of the answer: "It's important to own, operate and task national systems, but also to have access also to commercial ones, to federated ones and to bilateral or European ones."

That balance is the hard part. Kees Buijsrogge, director of TNO Space, a Dutch research organization, framed the core tension plainly: "What level of sovereignty do we need versus trusting in our partners and our neighbors? That's a difficult puzzle, especially if we look at the European situation at the moment." Sitael CEO Chiara Pertosa added that no single European country can fund everything — making industrial collaboration less a preference than a necessity.

Gobble's Take: The Viasat hack didn't just cut off modems — it permanently changed how NATO counts its satellites.

Source: SpaceNews

NASA's Planet-Hunter Just Mapped 5,844 Alien Worlds Across the Entire Sky

Think of your little brother shining a flashlight at the night sky during a camping trip, drowning out everything else. When he finally turns it off and your eyes adjust, thousands of stars emerge that were invisible before. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, has spent nearly eight years doing something like that for the entire heavens — and it just released an all-sky mosaic showing exactly what it found: 679 confirmed exoplanets rendered as blue dots, and 5,165 candidate exoplanets in orange, waiting for follow-up confirmation.

TESS launched in April 2018 as the designated successor to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which spent its primary mission from 2009 to 2013 staring at a single patch of sky covering roughly 0.25 percent of the total — about the size of your fist held at arm's length. When two of Kepler's reaction wheels failed, the mission was redesignated K2 and began rotating through multiple sky patches. Between the two, Kepler confirmed more than 3,000 exoplanets and flagged another 3,000 candidates. TESS essentially merged both approaches into one mission, scanning the full sky continuously. "Over the last eight years, TESS has become a fire hose of exoplanet science," said Dr. Rebekah Hounsell, a TESS associate project scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It's helped us find planets of all different sizes, from tiny Mercury-like ones to those larger than Jupiter."

With a third extended mission now running through at least September 2028, TESS shows no signs of slowing down. Every new dot added to that mosaic is another solar system where someone, somewhere, might be asking the exact same questions you are.

Gobble's Take: We went from "are there other planets?" to "which of these 5,844 do we check first?" — and that shift happened in under a decade.

Source: Universe Today

Quick Hits

• Russian cosmonauts log a five-hour EVA outside the ISS: Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub completed a spacewalk — formally called an Extravehicular Activity — performing maintenance on the station's exterior while orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth. Space.com
• Polar latitudes emerge as orbital chokepoints: A new strategic analysis argues that ground stations and launch infrastructure near Earth's poles offer unique advantages for surveillance orbits — turning the planet's frozen ends into contested real estate. War on the Rocks

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• Space is busy, and humanoids are no longer staying in their lane
• The history of spaceflight still reads like a highlight reel with a very sharp opening act
• Voyager and SpaceX sit on the same page, which is a very space-age kind of coincidence