Hispasat was always a small, polite GEO operator hovering over the Atlantic with just enough bandwidth to keep Iberia, North Africa, and Latin America connected. It lived mostly on broadcast contracts and a little Ka-band broadband, punching well below the weight of SES, Intelsat, or even Eutelsat. For years its value wasn’t in market share, but in being “the Spanish satellite operator,” which meant Madrid could point to it whenever Brussels started talking about “sovereign European capacity.”

That national-flag utility role is now permanent. In 2025, Redeia (the Spanish grid operator that had owned Hispasat since 2019) offloaded almost 90% of the company to Indra, Spain’s state-aligned defense and IT conglomerate, for about €725 million. The deal also came with Redeia’s 43% chunk of Hisdesat, the niche military satcom operator that supplies Spain’s defense and intelligence customers. Indra folded the whole package into its new “Indra Space” division, effectively turning Hispasat into the comms wing of a military-industrial project rather than a standalone commercial operator.

This was not a hostile takeover. The state owns nearly 30% of Indra, bumped SEPI’s direct stake in Hispasat to 10% as part of the shuffle, and has been openly talking about consolidating Spanish space assets for years. In other words: Hispasat didn’t get “bought,” it got nationalized with a corporate smile. Now instead of chasing airline connectivity deals or trying to carve out a sliver of Latin America, Hispasat’s future is bound to defense contracts, EU subsidy programs like IRIS², and whatever slice of Copernicus or Galileo Spain can grab.

Technically, the fleet is still modest, mostly GEO platforms serving broadcasters and regional connectivity needs. But the strategic narrative has shifted. Hispasat is no longer pretending to be a commercial challenger to Starlink or SES. It’s a state-backed communications utility, tucked neatly inside Indra’s broader push to be Spain’s prime contractor for both civil and defense space. That makes it safer, but also less interesting.

So the new Hispasat isn’t a company so much as a chess piece in Spain’s defense-industrial board game: a mid-sized fleet rebranded as “strategic sovereignty,” with customers that won’t dare leave because their contracts are now essentially political. The commercial satcom market won’t notice Hispasat much, but in Madrid’s space economy PowerPoint decks, it just went from footnote to crown jewel.