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The European Union broke ground in Cologne, Germany, for what will become the nervous system of the continent’s military communications — a terrestrial hub of the GOVSATCOM program that will connect sixteen countries in an encrypted channel of government satellites that no Russian jammer can take down.
What is GOVSATCOM and why is it different from any other satellite
GOVSATCOM — Governmental Satellite Communications — is the communications arm of the European Union’s space program. It is not a new satellite: it is the terrestrial backbone that distributes, routes, and protects military signals between governments, armed forces, and emergency services across Europe.
The distinction matters. Any country can hire commercial communication satellites. What Europe is building in Cologne is different: a sovereign infrastructure, with end-to-end encryption controlled by the EU and without reliance on contracts with American, Russian, or Chinese companies. When operational, the hub will manage the access of sixteen member states to channels that survive jamming, spoofing, and conventional electronic warfare attacks.
EUSPA — the European Union Agency for the Space Program — will operate the hub in partnership with the German space agency DLR. The choice of Cologne has history: the city already hosts the ESA’s European Astronaut Centre and has decades of expertise in operational space communications.
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What Ukraine taught about communications in war
The groundbreaking ceremony took place while Russian jamming systems continue to cause problems on air routes over the Baltic. The war in Ukraine proved in the field what strategists debated in theory: whoever controls the electromagnetic spectrum controls the battlefield.
Ukrainian units reported GPS outages and interferences caused by Russian jammers Krasukha and Borisoglebsk-2. The response was improvisation: Starlink radios, emergency analog communication, offline protocols. GOVSATCOM was designed precisely not to require this improvisation. Dedicated military frequencies, redundant routing through multiple satellites, and encryption that takes decades to break with classical computing.
I wonder what the heads of state of the Baltic countries felt when they saw the news — they are the ones living in the shadow of Kaliningrad, where Russia has installed S-400 systems and long-range jammers capable of covering the entire Gulf of Finland.
Two hubs, one network: the logic of redundancy
Cologne is the first of two planned hubs. The second will be installed in Portugal, creating geographical redundancy — if one suffers a cyber or physical attack, the other takes control without interruption.
It’s the same logic as distributed data centers that any tech company uses, applied to the space defense of a continent. The difference is that the cost of a failure is not a page offline: it’s a general without secure communication with his troops at a critical moment.
The physical construction of the building will take about two years, with full operation expected by 2028. Until then, the GOVSATCOM service is already active in a limited mode, using capacity from temporarily contracted European commercial satellites — including the fleet of SES, a Luxembourg company that operates more than twenty satellites in geostationary orbit.
The total cost of the GOVSATCOM program for the 2021-2027 period is budgeted at 819 million euros within the European space program regulation. For reference: it’s equivalent to building two medium aircraft carriers — but in infrastructure that will last decades and protect all EU governments at the same time.
What Brazil can learn from Cologne
In the last ten years, China has launched more than three hundred military and dual-use satellites. The US has the most robust constellation in the world. Europe decided it can no longer rely on bilateral agreements that can be renegotiated when political winds change. GOVSATCOM is the declaration of European strategic independence in the space domain.
Brazil operates the SGDC-1 and SGDC-2 — geostationary military communication satellites that represent real advances in national space sovereignty. But the terrestrial management and distribution infrastructure is still centralized and vulnerable. The Cologne model — protected physical hub, geographical redundancy, and sovereign encryption without external dependence — is the next step the Brazilian Strategic Space Systems Program needs to plan.
The scale difference between Brazil and the European Union exists. The architecture of the problem does not.
Read also: India that placed 52 spy satellites in orbit | Poland that took control of its radar satellite constellation.
Do you think Brazil should accelerate its own military satellite communications hub, or prefer to bet on strategic partnerships with allies? Comment below.
