EU’s satellite megaproject risks deepening digital colonialism as corporate space race accelerates under neoliberal austerity
Original framing: “Eutelsat expects $11 billion revenue after EU's Starlink rival comes online - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Indigenous critiques of satellite expansion often center on *celestial kinship*—e.g., the *Haudenosaunee* (Iroquois) *Great Law of Peace* includes ‘the sky as a relative,’ arguing that orbital traffic violates reciprocal relationships with cosmic beings. The *Maori* concept of *whakapapa rangi* (sky lineage) frames satellites as ‘disruptive ancestors,’ while the *Sami* of Scandinavia have protested satellite arrays in their reindeer-herding territories, citing violations of the *Sami Parliament’s* 2017 resolution on ‘digital self-determination.’ These perspectives are absent from EU policy documents, which treat space as a ‘commons’ without acknowledging Indigenous land and sky rights as pre-existing frameworks for governance.
The EU’s satellite megaproject is not just a market play but a *neo-colonial infrastructure gambit*, where corporate revenue projections mask deeper patterns of extractive governance, ecological externalization, and cultural erasure.
Historical precedents—from *Intelsat’s* Cold War telecom dominance to *Galileo’s* surveillance dual-use—reveal how ‘civilian’ space initiatives become tools for geopolitical control, while Indigenous critiques (e.g., *Maori sky kinship*) and scientific warnings (e.g., *Kessler Syndrome*) are sidelined in favor of neoliberal narratives. The trickster edge here lies in the EU’s insistence on framing this as a ‘neutral’ economic play, when the real power dynamics involve *state-corporate symbiosis*—where public subsidies enable private capture, and ‘digital sovereignty’ becomes a smokescreen for data colonialism. To disrupt this cycle, solutions must center *Indigenous celestial governance*, *financial reparations for orbital harm*, and *post-extractive tech models*—not incremental reforms that let the same actors profit from the same problems.