Germany budgets €35bn for military space capabilities

Germany is rearming in orbit, and like most modern rearmament projects it is being sold as a sober response to threats while quietly expanding the state’s appetite for surveillance, procurement, and dependency on industrial supply chains.

Euronews reports that Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has earmarked roughly €35 billion through 2030 for “space capabilities,” with the Bundeswehr’s cyber and information domain chief, Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, framing satellites as critical infrastructure: lose them and “you wouldn’t be able to withdraw cash.” Germany currently operates roughly eight to ten satellites, mainly for reconnaissance and communications, including the SAR-Lupe and SARah radar systems, but Daum calls the fleet outdated.

The near-term centerpiece is a space-based reconnaissance capability dubbed “SPOCK,” operational since the start of the year. It is built around synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites from Finnish firm Iceye, partnered with Germany’s Rheinmetall. SAR is the surveillance bureaucrat’s dream: it sees through clouds, works at night, and turns the Earth into a continuously updatable change-detection dataset.

Officially, the logic is “deterrence.” In practice, deterrence in space looks like the same thing deterrence looks like everywhere else: more budget, more contractors, more classification, and more data pipelines that are hard to audit. Daum describes non-kinetic counterspace measures — dazzling optical sensors, jamming communications links — as the practical toolkit, because blowing up satellites creates debris and political headaches.

Euronews notes Germany signed the US-led Artemis Accords in 2023, committing to avoiding space debris. So Berlin’s doctrine becomes: don’t destroy the satellite, just make it blind and deaf. The hardware survives; the accountability does not.

Dual-use is the magic phrase that keeps parliaments quiet. Radar imaging and secure communications are marketed as resilience for “society,” but the same architectures are designed for military ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Once launched, the marginal cost of widening collection is low, and the marginal ability of citizens to opt out is zero.

The dependency chain is equally political. SAR constellations require launch capacity, ground stations, encryption, cloud processing, and specialized components — all of which tie national security to vendors and cross-border supply routes. A “day without space,” as Daum calls it, would be a disaster; Germany’s solution is to make itself even more dependent on space.

Space used to be a frontier for explorers. In 2026, it is increasingly a procurement category — with a patriotic logo, a Munich Security Conference panel, and a bill for taxpayers.