--- title: The Starshield Debacle Is a Wake-Up Call for Europe description: "The throttling of Ukraine’s Starshield terminals has set capitals scrambling for an alternative. Europe’s IRIS² is years away, but cheap terminals for the OneWeb satellites already in orbit could close part of the gap sooner." url: https://fronts.co/article/the-starshield-debacle-is-a-wake-up-call-for-europe.md canonical: https://fronts.co/article/the-starshield-debacle-is-a-wake-up-call-for-europe/ datePublished: 2026-10-26T15:00:24.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-26T15:00:31.000Z author: - name: Jakub Janovsky url: https://fronts.co/authors/jakub-janovsky/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/the-starshield-debacle-is-a-wake-up-call-for-europe-f4dca291.jpg" type: NewsArticle language: en tokens: 2700 --- In the early hours of October the 14th, Ukrainian drones equipped with Starshield (a military version of the Starlink satellite communication system) suddenly stopped working properly. Without any warning from US officials about what was about to happen, terminals moving over 160km/h suddenly lost connection, and later that day, the maximum speed beyond which the connection was cut was further reduced to just 70-80km/h, with the 160km/h speed limit returning later. Due to the importance of the Starshield systems for the Ukrainian military, this had immediate negative effects on many military operations, including critical efforts to intercept Russian drones that have been striking Ukrainian cities, killing innocent civilians. What followed was an appalling blame game in which everyone with some position of power in the United States seemed to come out and claim they knew nothing about it. While later reporting in the [*Wall Street Journal*](https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-dbc49193?mod=e2tw) would point the finger at SpaceX owner Elon Musk, the precise cause is hardly the point. What matters is that a service that many nations today use for military or other critical services was unilaterally throttled without any warning. As such, the race is now on in capitals across the world for an alternative. The bad news is that no system currently exists that could replace Starshield. The good news is that this does not mean steps aren’t being taken in the right direction. And with a warning as crystal clear as this - that either the US government or Musk himself could disable national critical infrastructure on a whim - those steps are now coming to resemble a sprint. **Adaptation and Alternatives** European countries that are part of the EU and/or NATO have a long history of building and operating satellite communication systems, and have for years been working on an alternative to Starlink and Starshield. The origins of this came in 2022, when SpaceX initially delivered a batch of terminals to Ukraine free of charge. In that instant, defense departments were able to see how useful such services are for nations waging modern high-intensity warfare, and wanted in. To Europe’s credit, even in this early phase of the Ukraine War, the continent’s leaders realized that they could not stay dependent on a single provider, even if they were based in a nation that was a treaty ally. After all, any system using just one provider inherently has critical points of vulnerability - just see how easily Russia crippled the Viasat satellite communication system that the Ukrainian government used to rely on prior to the start of the full-scale invasion. Unfortunately, Europe's most promising commercial competitor/alternative to Starlink was OneWeb, a company so mismanaged that it declared bankruptcy in 2020. Still, it remained useful enough that the UK and French governments bailed it out, and today it still retains some 650 active satellites in orbit. What made OneWeb so important, despite the mismanagement, was where its satellites had been placed: in low Earth orbit (or LEO). Other European services all rely on traditional satellites in geostationary orbit, which makes them incapable of supporting the kind of services that Starlink and Starshield can offer. Unfortunately, OneWeb’s network cannot yet substitute for Starshield. Its new owner, EutelSat, has been struggling to raise funds and make relevant investments in upgrading the service. As a longer-term solution, then, the EU decided to build its own satellite constellation called IRIS². Sadly, and unsurprisingly, the initial effort was mired in the usual bureaucratic fights over the system's scale, design, funding, where the satellites would be built, and so on. After wasting precious years, an agreement has now finally been reached to launch hundreds of new satellites into low and medium orbit, plus integrate some existing and planned satellites like the upgraded future version of OneWeb. All of this will be funded by the European public to the tune of €11.6B, while the European space industry consortium will cover the remaining needed €4B. The problem is that as of late 2026, most of this exists only on paper, and the technical specifications of contracted satellites are, at best, unimpressive. Each “upgraded” OneWeb satellite will only have about 15Gb/s capacity for its users, with just 2-4 usually being over any specific area like eastern Ukraine, and the other contracted satellites not being much better. That looks pathetic compared to over ten thousand Starlink satellites, most of which have 96Gb/s capacity. As a “bonus”, Europe lacks the necessary launch capacity to put these satellites into orbit quickly, because its only heavy-lift rocket, the Ariane 6, is not reusable, and its maximum production rate is 10-12 per year - with those rockets also being contracted to launch other governmental and commercial payloads. What is extra depressing is that many of SpaceX's design solutions for making its Starlink satellites relatively easy and cheap to mass-produce while providing them with impressive network capacity are known and relatively easy to replicate (at least at a conceptual level). Yet still European satellite providers and government officials insist on using obsolete design concepts that deliver inferior service… a sentence that may very well one day serve as an epitaph to the entire European satellite project. **When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Satellite Terminals** But not all is doom and gloom. Given the clear existential risk of continuing to rely on SpaceX, there are some things that Europe should be able to implement even before its IRIS² system becomes operational (which, while not impressive, might ultimately be sufficient for the most important government users). At the very least, Europe will need to set up its own local mass production of user terminals for IRIS² - especially if European armies hope to use IRIS² for expendable munitions, just as Ukraine has been doing with Starshield. This will require being able to produce hundreds of thousands of cheap, simple terminals per year. Crucially, this is not impossible. The techniques for creating a slimmed-down terminal already exist. Better still, these mass-manufactured terminals could quickly make OneWeb’s current service militarily relevant. The current third-party manufactured OneWeb terminals are inferior to Starlink terminals in pretty much every way, except durability and the use of expensive components certified for military use:                                                OneWeb (Intellian OW7MP)               Starlink Mini Mass:                                      9kg                                                      1.1kg Dimensions:                            458 x 358 x 108 mm                            298.5 x 259 x 38.5 mm Average Power Draw             100–125W                                           25W–40W Max Download Speed            57Mbps                                               150–300+ Mbps Max Upload Speed                 10Mbps                                               15–20 Mbps Hardware Cost                        ~$25K                                                 ~$600 To put it simply, the current OneWeb user terminals are unsuitable for use in a drone war, such as the one in Ukraine. But while the fact that OneWeb satellites are at a significantly higher altitude (1,200km compared to Starlink's 400-500 km) means that its terminals will always have to be larger and consume more power, it should be entirely possible to design a stripped-down OneWeb terminal for brief, expendable use on military drones. After all, such drones have a lifespan measured in hours, so expensive components can be dropped entirely. Meanwhile, many of Starlink's design approaches can be directly copied, and the performance of the drones' connectivity for remote control can actually be lower. The resulting terminal wouldn't be pretty or high-performance, but these changes would massively drop the terminal's mass and power use and lower its cost to something at least approaching Starlink. In other words, if European industry were to design such a OneWeb terminal and mass-produce it, and allocate necessary network capacity to military-grade users (at the cost of slowing things for OneWeb’s existing commercial users), it could provide a real alternative to Starshield terminals for drones that require remote control or that need to send their ISR data to operators. This would not just restore the capabilities Ukraine lost during the Starshield debacle, but also give Europe the independent capability to provide these capabilities over Russia - something which Ukraine has requested from the USA/SpaceX, in order to improve its capacity to hunt the Russian ballistic missile launchers that are terrorizing Ukrainian cities. To date, SpaceX and Washington have refused to make this service available. The main problem is the time it would take to implement such a change, which would likely require effective nationalization of OneWeb to force it to change how its network operates (currently very, very inefficiently). But given that the valuation of its parent company is just a few billion euros, that shouldn't be either too difficult or too expensive if treated as a national security priority. As always when Europe is in a tight but not yet desperate situation, the question comes down to (a lack of) political will. **Ball, Meet Court** While there is no doubt that in the long term, the US sabotage (hard to call it anything else) of Ukraine’s Starshield service will drive customers to obtain their own alternatives, regardless of the difficulty and cost, full replacement won't happen for quite a few years. The relatively good news is that Starshield/Starlink service limitations in Ukraine are not affecting the vast majority of Ukrainian users, unlike the complete shutdown that the Russian military experienced earlier in 2026, which would make a far more drastic impact on the Ukrainian military. That means the current urgent need is to replace Starshield only in some use cases, and the OneWeb constellation gives Europe at least a theoretical option for how we can relatively quickly reduce our dependence on Starshield, and maybe even give Ukraine a new capability. The key is that governments must immediately take action, instead of falling back into their familiar comfort zone of organizing meetings about the schedule of future meetings. As a European who closely follows these things, I am not confident that this will actually happen, but it’s nice to know we at least have the option.