“Our Achilles’ heel lies in space,” warned German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius at the Berlin Space Conference in September last year.
Those were not empty words. Germany is increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of its space assets and limits to its sovereign space capability. And it is coughing up serious funding in response.
The country plans to invest €35 billion by 2030 in defence space technologies for sovereign German infrastructure. That’s an enormous rise on the roughly €200 million per year it was averaging previously, and matches the entire five-year budget of the European Space Agency, to which Germany is the biggest contributor.
”Germany is leading the way in terms of levels of [space security] investment in Europe,” said James Black, deputy director of the defence and security research group at RAND Europe, who also leads the RAND Europe Space Hub.
This is part of a broader trend of increased German military funding.
“Germany is pouring funds into all five of the operational domains recognised by NATO, but there is a particular interest in space,” said Black. “It’s reflective of a change in threat, obviously changing technology, resource availability, and a concern about not just the dependency and security, but also ultimately having sovereign capabilities in space.”
The emphasis on space is very recent.
“Germany has changed on a dime its whole conceptual view of space as a military domain, literally within the space of two years,” said Dr John Sheldon, founding partner at AstroAnalytica. “It’s been quite remarkable to watch.”
What is Germany preparing for?
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call. As Germany’s most recent Space Security strategy states, “Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 in violation of international law began with attacks on Ukraine’s satellite-based communication, highlighting that future conflicts will also be carried out in space.”
Russia’s strategic thinking specifically identifies space as a key vulnerability of NATO partners, as Resilience Media recently noted.
The Space Security strategy names Russia fourteen times, highlighting it as the principal threat to Europe, though it also notes China’s growing space capabilities, Sino-Russian support for Iran and North Korea, and the likelihood of proliferation of counterspace capabilities in the future.
Germany is not just worried about the use of space in a conflict, but also Russia’s current aggressive so-called greyzone actions against European satellites.
In February, the Financial Times reported that two Russian spycraft were believed to have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites, including Germany’s. That’s part of a broader pattern: the Secure World Foundation has identified a total of sixteen known or suspected incidents of threatening manoeuvres (known as RPO) by Russian military and intelligence satellites between 2014 and 2025.
There is “a broader recognition from European NATO allies that you need to be able to deal with threats both below and above the threshold of armed conflict,” said Black. “It’s not just about preparing for war fighting scenarios and the threats to space there, it’s also about how you deal with growing so-called hybrid or sub-threshold threats.”
Greyzone actions in space are often ambiguous and deniable, meaning they have relatively low strategic cost for actors like Russia, while also holding critical assets at risk, said Black. European countries are “missing rungs in the escalation ladder of response options” for such threats, he added.
What is Germany’s strategy in response?
“I think ultimately it’s a very realistic strategy that actually looked at Ukraine properly and said: obviously not every lesson is transferable, but we evidently need to modernise our forces, and space is a huge aspect of that,” said Juliana Suess, who researches space security at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin.
To bolster its overall military capabilities, Germany is investing in modernising its space assets. It has signalled investments in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites, boosting earth observation and space domain awareness capabilities.
One important area of modernisation will be in military communications. Germany has announced plans for a €10 billion low Earth orbit military satellite network, with a hundred satellites exclusively for the military, to be delivered as a collaboration with Rheinmetall, OHB and Airbus.
This has been the subject of some controversy, drawing criticism from EU lawmakers over fears of duplication of, and non-integration with, IRIS² , an EU-wide secure communications and internet constellation under development.
In an interview with POLITICO in June, Major General Michael Traut, commander of the Bundeswehr Space Command, said that Germany’s constellation would leave more bandwidth on IRIS² for other users, and that partners would be able to use the German network in future.
But as the country upgrades and increases the number of military assets it has in space, it is also investing heavily in protecting them.
The exact details remain vague. In the POLITICO interview, Traut said that Germany wants the capability to act against enemy space systems across the wider infrastructure that makes satellites work, from ground stations to jammers.
Germany has pledged not to deploy kinetic weapons in orbit, which are highly irresponsible because of the enormous debris they generate. However, Traut added that the country will acquire non-kinetic systems including jammers and lasers, as well as inspection satellites. Longer term, it will develop spaceplanes which could protect German satellites, inspect adversary systems and potentially act against them.
“You don’t go into the arena only with a shield,” explained Traut. “A functioning deterrent always has an active, offensive component.”
The bodyguard approach
To further bolster defence of its critical satellites, Germany is investing in “bodyguard satellites.”
This is “a sort of catch-all term for a satellite that’s agile enough to be sent to the rescue of any satellite that needs it,” said Suess. “Obviously the capabilities can differ vastly: you could have a satellite with a robotic arm, or you could have one with projectiles, or just a jammer.”
“It’s a last line of defense against your core strategic asset, and if you’re smart, you would also have thrusters on your actual protected asset, so it can maneuver away from any threat that comes to it,” said Sheldon.
Germany has not specified which capabilities it plans for its bodyguard satellites to have, but there are some indications.
“They have put out a tender for a satellite that could jam in space, a sort of co-orbital jamming device. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they’re aiming for, but we haven’t had an official statement confirming that,” said Suess.
The country’s willingness to fund its space defence capabilities is encouraging, but questions remain about how quickly the country’s space industry can deliver.
“It’s a gigantic number to inject into a system that is just not used to that scale. That brings risks with it,” said Suess.
“Germany has a healthy space industry, but the focus on defence is relatively recent,” she added. “There’s definitely a risk of trying to get industry to do too much too soon: having projects go up that simply aren’t ready, and having hardware up that’s not up to the standard that it’s meant to be.”
Such issues would not be unprecedented. According to reporting from Der Spiegel, two German military satellites launched in December 2023 took over six months to become operational because their radar antennas could not unfold. Der Spiegel reported that manufacturer OHB had failed to test them on the ground, which Resilience Media was unable to verify.
Regardless, Germany is now leading the way among larger European NATO countries on funding space.
“There’s not a shortage of serious thinkers about space in London or Paris or Rome or elsewhere”, says Black. “But a lot of it comes down to resources. In Berlin we’ve seen, since February 22, an even greater political shift in the cross-party and public awareness of the threat posed by Russia. Combined with the scale of the German economy and the different fiscal situation, there’s a level of funding available that hasn’t yet been made available in other countries.”
“It ultimately all comes down to political choices, and Germany’s politicians, so far, have proven willing,” he added.
