A UK satellite manufacturer has put the hardware for a 192-spacecraft European satellite internet network on public display, days before a war-analysis newsletter argued that European powers must urgently break Elon Musk’s near-monopoly over military satellite communications — SATCOM in the trade. Open Cosmos, the UK satellite builder behind the ConnectedCosmos constellation, showed assembled satellites at its Harwell factory on a tour reported on 28 October by the technology news outlet news.lavx.hu, while Trench Art, a reader-supported war news and analysis publication, published its case for European alternatives on 4 November.
Key facts
- Open Cosmos plans more than 96 ConnectedCosmos satellites in orbit by the end of 2028 and full availability across its coverage area by 2030, around a core backbone of 192 spacecraft, news.lavx.hu reports.
- Rocket Lab, the launch company, placed the first two ConnectedCosmos satellites in orbit in January 2026, according to the same report.
- Open Cosmos says its production line can turn out one satellite per day; news.lavx.hu notes SpaceX claimed roughly 70 Starlinks per week in its IPO filing.
- ConnectedCosmos operates above 1,000 km. Chief technology officer Jordi Barrera put the round trip at 30 to 80 milliseconds, the outlet says.
- Trench Art reports that thousands of satellite terminals in Ukraine failed overnight and without warning after SpaceX imposed a speed limit of approximately 160 kmh (100 mph), and that Musk lifted it after around a week.
- On price, Trench Art puts Starlink as low as $55 a month for private users in the United States, with nearly 14 million paying subscribers.
Why it matters
news.lavx.hu says the Ukraine episode — service throttled and then restored — pushed governments and companies to examine who controls the satellite internet links they pay for. Trench Art frames the stakes more bluntly, arguing that European powers must act so that no one man can repeat SpaceX’s treatment of Ukraine, and conceding that doing so will be neither easy, cheap nor fast.
The same dependence question has run through the Starshield outages story and through the complaints of security chiefs who called for sovereign control after the cutoff.
What happened in Ukraine
Trench Art reports that Starlink is a commercial satellite internet service and Starshield a more capable military version sold to governments, both owned by Musk’s SpaceX, and that Ukraine and many other Western powers rely on them to connect troops to headquarters and drones to operators.
Once the speed cap was in place, the outlet says, a drone travelling faster than roughly 160 kmh could not connect to its operator, and many faster drones — including the interceptor drones Ukraine uses against Russian attack drones — could not function.
Musk eventually said he had ordered the restrictions because Ukraine had violated the service’s terms and conditions by using Starlink for offensive rather than defensive missions, according to Trench Art. Ukrainian officials denied that.
On the timeline: the same report refers both to throttling in early October and to terminals failing in mid-October. Read together with its own account of a cap that lasted about a week, those appear to be the start and the end of one episode rather than two separate cutoffs. Neither outlet gives a firm date, and we could not independently fix one.
The European answer on display
ConnectedCosmos is Open Cosmos’s response to the connectivity question, news.lavx.hu reports. Founder and chief executive Rafel Jordà Siquier described the 192 spacecraft as “the foundation, not the ceiling.”
The outlet says the company describes the design as built around the requirements of government, institutional and commercial customers that need secure, resilient connectivity and clear custody of critical data — framing aimed at buyers who watched a foreign provider throttle service and want a channel a European operator controls. ConnectedCosmos also sells point-to-point broadband, a dedicated link between two fixed sites, it adds.
Open Cosmos is not the only option on the table. news.lavx.hu notes that Eutelsat OneWeb flies a competing constellation, and European telecom operators have signed their own pact to challenge Starlink.
The trade-off: latency for fewer satellites
Operating above 1,000 km needs far fewer satellites than low-Earth-orbit constellations and adds latency, news.lavx.hu reports. Most applications absorb that delay without trouble, the outlet says, but guiding drones at high velocity does not — the precise use case that failed in Ukraine. It lists telemetry, sensor feeds and IoT traffic as the fit, and says the company states plainly that fast-moving drone guidance falls outside the service.
Scale, and where the sources differ
Trench Art describes Starlink and Starshield as the world’s most flexible, affordable and robust SATCOM services, with subscribers gaining access to a constellation of 11,000 signal-relaying satellites in low Earth orbit. news.lavx.hu puts the figure differently, saying Starlink passes 10,000 satellites. Neither source reconciles the two counts.
On manufacturing, news.lavx.hu says the Harwell floor supports the one-satellite-a-day claim, with each spacecraft starting from a common bus before taking on solar panels and its payload, and finished units waiting in what one company representative called the “satellite nursery.” The outlet argues the visible hardware separates Open Cosmos from startups that exist only on slides, and answers the question European buyers keep asking: who runs the network, and can someone else switch it off.
What we could not verify
This account rests on two secondary outlets. Neither carries a comment from SpaceX or from Ukraine’s government on the cap, its stated justification or its duration, and we found no third publication confirming the terminal failures or the exact dates. Treat the throttle details as Trench Art’s reporting until a primary source speaks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will ConnectedCosmos offer direct-to-smartphone service like Starlink Mobile?
No, not at this stage. Danielle Edwards, vice president of commercial satcom at Open Cosmos, told news.lavx.hu that the company is “very much in the direct device business” but that direct to smartphone “is not an area that we have an interest in right now.” She said the direct device play for Open Cosmos is on the IoT side, while leaving the door open to a change later.
What is OpenConstellation, and how is it different from Copernicus?
According to news.lavx.hu, OpenConstellation is an Open Cosmos service that lets organisations share data from Earth observation satellites, launched in 2022 with a target of 25 satellites covering a mix of spatial and spectral resolution. Customers assign those satellites specific tasks for specific data collections — a service the outlet says Copernicus, the European Commission’s Earth observation programme, does not provide. OpenConstellation satellites use ConnectedCosmos as their connectivity backbone.
Where does Open Cosmos build its satellites?
news.lavx.hu reports that Open Cosmos assembles spacecraft at a facility in Harwell in the UK, with additional sites in Greece and Portugal. The outlet says the company was founded about 10 years ago and has flown dozens of missions. Journalists on the factory tour were shown thermal and pressure chambers and a shaker table that reproduces launch vibration.
Do astronomers object to these constellations?
news.lavx.hu reports that Starlink draws regular complaints from astronomers about brightness and radio interference. The outlet says a 192-satellite backbone at higher altitude raises far fewer of those objections.
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