Leased Skies

How Satellites, States, and Markets Carved Up Connectivity for Power and Profit

Satellite connectivity is easy to romanticise. Put something in orbit, wrap it in words like sovereignty, resilience and innovation, and hope nobody looks too closely at the contracts. Leased Skies is a book about what actually happened when those stories hit procurement rooms, export controls, lead times and the quiet leverage of whoever controls the terminal on the roof, the deck or the vehicle. It follows the last cycle of satellite connectivity as a real system, not a slide deck, and asks a simple question: who actually ended up in control?

This is not a celebration of “NewSpace”, and it is not a technical handbook pretending the market is a clean room. It follows satellite connectivity as infrastructure, which means it behaves like infrastructure. It has chokepoints, contracts, gatekeepers, incentives, and the quiet advantage of whoever controls the ground segment, the firmware, the account, and the escalation path when it breaks.

If you work in satcom, telecom, defence, policy, maritime, aviation, energy, or any remote operation where connectivity is treated as a utility right up until it fails, you already know the difference between coverage and control. This book gives that difference a spine. It traces how platforms became power, how procurement habits shaped winners, how regulation tried to catch up, and how “sovereign capability” kept getting sold as a feeling instead of built as a system.

The tone is straight. Orbital Whispers earns its sarcasm by puncturing marketing posture, this book aims for something more durable. It stays close to the mechanics, the incentives, and the decisions that keep repeating. You can read it as a narrative of the last cycle, you can also treat it as a reference when the next wave of announcements arrives with the same glossy certainty.

Somewhere along the way, the sector stopped being a collection of specialised suppliers and started behaving like a platform economy. That shift did not happen in space, it happened in procurement rooms, in terminal strategies, in gateway politics, in service design, and in the ability to scale without collapsing under your own promises. Leased Skies is an attempt to describe that reality clearly, without requiring the reader to clap for it.

About the author

Michaël R.C. De Coninck works close to the operational end of connectivity, where systems are expected to function on vessels, remote sites, and in the kind of environments where excuses do not stay convincing for long. Through Satmarin, Hyper-Networks and Orbital Whispers, he has watched the industry’s language evolve faster than its supply chains, and its ambition grow faster than its discipline. This book comes from that vantage point, the place where the slogans eventually report for duty.

Get the book

Leased Skies is available in Hardcopy and paperback. For company orders send inquiries to [email protected]