Poland Can Into Space – Military Race with High Ambitions

Poland has placed its first military radar satellite into orbit. Delivered by the Finnish-Polish company ICEYE under a contract for at least three units, MikroSAR joins a club of only forty three such satellites across European Union (EU) states (as of 2023, based on UCS Satellite Database classification). Although it pales beside the fleets of America, China and Russia, the timing is critical for Poland – and for Europe.

On Friday, a Falcon 9 rocket on SpaceX’s Transporter-15 mission carried a small but politically weighty payload – MikroSAR, the first military radar satellite for the Polish Armed Forces, built by Finnish-Polish company ICEYE.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland has turned itself into NATO’s top purchaser, buying tanks, artillery and aircraft at a pace that has strained both suppliers and domestic budgets. A missing piece was a layer of autonomous space-based intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, which Poland plans to expand for both defence necessity and political ambition (EU Space Agency bid).

As NATO officially recognised space as a fifth domain of warfare in December 2019, alongside land, sea, air and cyberspace, the stakes have become painfully clear. Russian forces fired 270 missiles at Ukraine in October alone, a forty six per cent increase on the previous month, and a total of 11,466 missiles between September 2022 and 2024, even if around 83.5 per cent were intercepted.