Starlink is becoming contestable, and Europe cannot launch its way out. It simply has to look up.
Two things happened to Starlink in Ukraine this year. Together, they should change the planning assumption for every European program that relies on connectivity.
In late January 2026, an operator-flown Shahed-type drone reached Kyiv using a Starlink terminal. Ukraine’s then-new, now recently ousted, defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, took the problem straight to Elon himself. Within days, Ukraine had stood up a whitelist, registering authorized terminals through its administrative service centers and the Diia app, and on 5 February SpaceX switched off everything not on the list. Ukrainian officials described Russian command and control collapsing across the front, with some units losing close to 90% of their connectivity. Assault operations stopped in several sectors.
Five months later, Reuters reported the counter-move. Russia has fielded a purpose-built Starlink jammer, the Volna Kupol Garant, and Ukraine has found about ten of them.
How to Jam a Satellite
Jamming is flooding either the receiver or the transmitter with noise in the right band. For Starlink, that means either the terminal or the satellite. The terminal is usually much closer to the jammer (on the ground) than the satellite, so you might think it’s easier to jam, but not necessarily.
The terminal is a phased array looking up at high elevation with a beam a few degrees wide. A ground-based jammer sits near the horizon, entering through sidelobes 25 to 30 dB below boresight. So to work, it has to be close, loud, or both.
The uplink has a different problem: instead of blinding the terminal, the jammer shouts at the satellite, trying to arrive at its receiver louder than the terminal’s own signal. The jammer and terminal both sit on the ground roughly 5,500 km from the satellite, so geometry gives the jammer no edge, and the contest reduces to raw radiated power. The satellite’s receive beam covers a footprint tens of kilometers across, so drowning out one terminal drowns out every terminal in that footprint, including your own side, wrhich isn’t an issue for the Russians.
Then there is motion: a satellite crosses the sky in minutes, handovers are constant, and the traffic is spread across many satellites, many beams, and 500 MHz of Ku-band, so a jammer has to hold all of it at once.
Finally, software: SpaceX has answered previous rounds of interference by adjusting beam steering, signal processing, and frequency management within days.
The Volna Kupol Garant (Peresvet-M in Ukrainian parlance) shows what beating that could look like: six trailers of dish antennas radiating in the 14.0 to 14.5 GHz uplink band, hitting eight satellite channels simultaneously, at a reported $1.5M per complex. This means roughly 20 km² of denial, a bubble about 2.5 km in radius. That’s more than enough to lose connectivity and thus manual steering capability.
But blasting continuous high power across half a gigahertz produces an emission signature visible from far away, and Ukraine’s 422nd Unmanned Systems Regiment has been hunting them down. Ten have been identified, two destroyed, one within hours of detection, according to public sources.
Starlink is not jam-proof. It is jam-expensive. However, Starlink could counter a known stationary jammer through software by steering a pattern null through a phased array at the jammer. This doesn’t solve Europe’s and other regions’ dependency problem, though.
Too Much Leverage
Not many Europeans feel philosophically close to Elon Musk, and his strategic goals beyond going to Mars are unclear. Rather, it’s unclear what that means for Europe. Likely not much in his Grand Scheme. That’s one reason, besides political pressure, financial incentives, or plain ITAR, that Europe and many other regions, like Taiwan, can’t depend on Starlink.
By Musk’s own account in March 2025, he’s capable of collapsing Ukraine’s front line if pointed the other way. Poland pays roughly $50M a year for Ukraine’s service, and Radosław Sikorski said plainly that an unreliable provider would send Warsaw looking elsewhere. Now might be a good time to do so.
Having something harder to jam, and that gives us accurate positioning and communication,s would be strategically important for Europe. It’s unlikely we’ll get there in the same way Starlink did, though.
The Launch Arithmetic Does Not Close
Europe’s orbital answer is IRIS²: about 290 satellites across LEO and MEO, €10.6 billion, first launches in 2029, initial services around 2030, full operations in early 2031.
The vehicle to put it there is constrained: Arianespace targeted six to eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026 against a ceiling near ten, and ESA is now studying scenarios of 12, 15 and 20 flights a year for 2030 precisely because it expects a shortage. Eighteen of the near-term Ariane 6 flights are contracted to Amazon’s LEO constellation, which faces an FCC deployment deadline of 30 July 2029. Vega C flies rarely and has just moved to Avio’s commercial management.
The American on-ramp is closing as SpaceX has stopped taking new Transporter and Bandwagon bookings beyond late 2028, citing a full Falcon 9 manifest, and the remaining slots have little mass margin left. European smallsat companies that built business cases on cheap, predictable rideshare are now buying dedicated launches or waiting. Amazon’s Kuiper team has 1000s of satellites waiting for launch, but SpaceX naturally constrains them. Why would they allow more competition than antitrust requires?
Any plan for European connectivity sovereignty before 2030 has to work without meaningful new orbital mass. Maybe Isar Aerospace gets their act together, but I’m not hopeful.
20 Kilometers Instead of 550
Getting to orbit is expensive, or impossible, and the satellites are expensive. Instead, let’s consider flying up;d because we’re closer to Earth and still in the atmosphere, we can use COTS hardware.
High-altitude platform stations fly at 17 to 25 km on solar power, with station-keeping for weeks or months. The ITU has defined and allocated spectrum for them since the 1990s. Airbus subsidiary AALTO flies Zephyr, the only fixed-wing HAPS to have demonstrated day-and-night stratospheric endurance, though it is not reliable or cheap. Inflection portfolio company Radical Aero has flown a full-scale prototype and is set for the stratosphere at a fraction of Zephyr’s cost.
The link budget is one strong argument for HAPS vs. Sats. Free-space path loss at 20 km is 28.8 dB below the loss to a satellite at 550 km. That margin buys smaller terminals, lower transmit power, or headroom against interference, and it is available at the operator’s discretion rather than fixed at launch.
Two operational properties matter as well: A platform comes down, takes a new payload, and goes back up inside a few days depending on weather conditions, so the waveform is not frozen eighteen months before flight. And it can be repositioned in hours in response to an EW picture. Also, a HAPS constellation doesn’t need 10s of thousands of satellites for coverage; you can have a couple and a few in reserve.
Shooting down something at 20 km isn’t easy, as shown by the Chinese weather balloon incident a few years ago, when the US scrambled an F-22 Raptor and fired a Sidewinder at it. That little operation cost the US over $500k, with the Sidewinder alone going for about $400k.
The case is layering and independence. Persistent stratospheric presence is Europe’s only viable alternative at this point.
