At a space-security summit in Paris this month, Novaspace chief executive Pacôme Révillon put a number on something most of the room already suspected: defence-owned reconnaissance satellites launched worldwide between 2026 and 2035 will reach 2,306, against just 485 in the decade before. Nobody asked what changed. In March 2025, Washington suspended Ukraine’s access to the Maxar-run GEGD satellite feed for about a week, testing in real time whether an intelligence lifeline built for a wartime partner could be switched off like a subscription. It could, and it was. Eighteen months later, at least 55 governments carry dedicated space-defence budgets, Poland has just announced its own “Polish Starlink,” and the number that should worry Washington is not how many satellites are going up. It is who decided they could no longer wait for an American answer.
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