There's a Sensor on a Gas Pipeline Under the North Sea. It Reports to a Satellite Every Hour. That Satellite Is American.

There's a sensor on a gas pipeline under the North Sea. It reports its pressure readings to a satellite every hour.

That satellite is American.

So is the one tracking your country's fishing fleet. And the one your port authority uses to monitor container ships. And the one that tells a Spanish olive farmer whether his soil is too dry to irrigate.

For thirty years, nobody thought this was a problem. Then Russia invaded Ukraine — and in a single weekend, the entire world found out that the most important satellite network in the war was controlled by one private American company. And that one man could decide, unilaterally, whether Ukrainian drones could operate in certain areas.

Suddenly, every government in the world had the same realization. We built our critical infrastructure on someone else's infrastructure.

The Invisible Dependency

When people talk about satellites, they picture weather maps and GPS navigation. The more consequential story is quieter: billions of tiny sensors, trackers, and monitoring devices that silently ping space every few minutes. Agricultural IoT. Logistics. Environmental monitoring. Pipeline telemetry. Maritime traffic. Smart grid infrastructure.

All of it goes through satellite networks. And almost none of those networks are European.

Those numbers are from live public TLE catalog data — the same data you can explore on the SkyLens live tracker right now. They tell a stark story. The US operates nearly 70 times more satellites than all of Europe combined. China is building fast. Europe is, to put it plainly, dependent.

Spain Just Blinked First

This week, a Madrid startup called FOSSA Systems announced it had raised $10.5 million — including money from a government-backed Spanish investment vehicle — to expand what it calls a "sovereign" satellite connectivity network.

FOSSA isn't building rockets. They're building something smaller and, arguably, more strategic: a constellation of satellites the size of a hardback book that give European companies their own dedicated channel to the Internet of Things — one that stays within European legal jurisdiction from sensor to ground station.

FOSSA's satellites use a radio protocol called LoRa — low power, long range, tiny bandwidth. A soil sensor on a farm in Andalusia can ping a FOSSA satellite every hour for years on a single battery. The data goes to a European ground station. It stays under EU law. It can't be accessed by a foreign intelligence agency without a European court order.

That last part is the product. Not the satellite. The jurisdiction.

The Ukraine Lesson That Changed Everything

In the early days of the war, Starlink terminals kept Ukrainian command posts online when everything else failed. Elon Musk was, briefly, the most important person in the conflict. Then reports emerged that SpaceX had geofenced Starlink coverage near Crimea to limit drone operations. Some accounts were disputed. Others were confirmed by Musk himself in a biography.

The lesson wasn't lost on anyone watching from Brussels or Madrid or Warsaw. A private American company had made a real-time decision affecting a European war. Nobody in Europe had a vote.

This is what "sovereign connectivity" actually means: if something goes wrong — a war, a sanctions dispute, a diplomatic breakdown — your infrastructure doesn't depend on a foreign billionaire's goodwill or Washington's geopolitical calculus. You control the satellite. You control the data. You control the switch.

They're Not Alone. And That's the Point.

FOSSA isn't the only company chasing this. France's Kinéis launched 25 IoT satellites last year. The UK has Eutelsat (absorbed OneWeb). Germany and Luxembourg have backed multiple satellite ventures through ESA programs. China built its entire BeiDou navigation system specifically so it wouldn't have to trust US GPS. India launched NavIC. Brazil is developing SGDC-2.

The global space economy is quietly fragmenting along geopolitical lines. The same way countries built their own nuclear plants, their own internet exchange points, their own undersea cable landing stations — they're now building their own orbital infrastructure. Piece by piece.

The race isn't about who gets to space first anymore. It's about who controls the plumbing of the global economy from space. And right now, that plumbing is overwhelmingly American — with China rapidly building a parallel system. Europe is running behind. But it's no longer ignoring the problem.

Why a 300-Gram Satellite Changes the Calculation

FOSSA's satellites weigh roughly 300 grams — lighter than a can of soda. They cost a tiny fraction of what a traditional communications satellite costs to build and launch. Which means that a startup with $10 million can actually do this. Ten years ago, that would have been impossible.

The collapse in launch costs — driven largely by the same American company Europe is now trying to route around — democratized access to orbit. A pocketQube the size of a Rubik's cube can provide genuine global IoT coverage with a constellation of 50 or 60 units. The barrier to "owning your own slice of orbit" has never been lower.

Spain's government didn't fund a moonshot. It funded something far more practical: a dedicated European channel for the sensor data flowing out of its farms, ports, pipelines, and factories. It funded the ability to say no to someone else's terms of service.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Here's the uncomfortable implication. If Europe is spending government money on sovereign satellite networks because it can't fully trust American ones — what does that say about the US-Europe alliance? Or about the assumption that NATO allies share infrastructure without conditions?

The honest answer is that satellite infrastructure has always had backdoors, always been subject to the laws of its operating country, and always been a tool of statecraft as much as commerce. What changed is the scale. When billions of devices in hospitals, power grids, ports, and farms route their data through satellites you don't control, the asymmetry stops being theoretical.

The next decade of the space economy won't be defined by who lands on the Moon first. It'll be defined by who owns the satellites that the world's economy quietly depends on every single minute of every day. Want to understand how orbit actually works — and why altitude determines jurisdiction as much as physics? Read the orbit explainer on SkyLens.

What Happens Next

FOSSA says the new funding will accelerate constellation deployment and push into EU government and defense contracts. Their pitch is simple: European data, European satellites, European law. For utilities, logistics companies, and governments that have started asking uncomfortable questions about their satellite dependencies, that pitch is landing differently than it would have in 2021.

The broader race plays out over the next decade. Whether European companies can carve out a meaningful sovereign slice of low Earth orbit before the useful bandwidth is dominated by two superpowers — that's the real competition happening 550 kilometers above your head right now.

It isn't a space race. It's a geopolitical race that happens to take place in space.

Curious how satellites are distributed by country and purpose right now? Open the live tracker and filter by owner — the gap between the US, China, and everyone else is visible in seconds.