IRIS² is the EU’s attempt to buy itself a spine in space. Officially it’s about resilience, connectivity and security. In reality it’s Brussels writing a €10-plus billion check to the usual contractors so that Europe doesn’t have to beg Elon Musk for bandwidth the next time it deploys troops or humanitarian teams. The Ukraine war made the weakness obvious; IRIS² is the face-saving fix.

The constellation is supposed to be a few hundred LEO satellites plus some MEO relays, operational around 2030. That’s not a Starlink rival, despite what every press release implies. Starlink deploys that many spacecraft in a couple of Falcon 9 launches. IRIS² will be smaller, slower, and focused on encrypted government traffic and selective coverage, not consumer broadband. The comparison is political theater, not technical reality.

The industrial structure is exactly what you’d expect. SES and Eutelsat at the front, Airbus and Thales Alenia cutting the biggest slices, OHB and Hispasat hanging on, telecom incumbents sprinkled in for legitimacy. It’s a Franco-German-Spanish work-share scheme wrapped in the language of sovereignty. Everyone gets contracts, no one gets left out, and efficiency is an afterthought.

The timeline is hopeless. Launches starting in 2025, full operations by 2030. By then Starlink will have iterated through multiple hardware generations, Kuiper may finally be real, and China will have its own constellations blanketing Eurasia. IRIS² will still be struggling with ground segment integration reviews and political oversight committees.

What this really buys Europe is dignity. Brussels can say it has a sovereign satcom system, even if it arrives late, costs more than it should, and delivers less than advertised. Airbus and Thales get to keep their factories busy, SES and Eutelsat get a government-backed LEO lifeline, and the Commission gets to pretend it’s not a spectator in the global broadband race. For strategic autonomy, that may be good enough. For actual competitiveness, it isn’t even close.