In a time of shifting geopolitics, rapid technological advances, and scalable satellite constellations, ICEYE has become the trusted partner for defense and intelligence organizations in Finland, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ukraine.
As more nations accelerate programs to develop sovereign defense and intelligence capabilities in space, starting with ICEYE SAR constellations, a new question emerged last year: How can we connect them?
Linked bottom-up, nation by nation, they become something much more than the sum of its parts: a federated fleet.
Small sovereign fleets used to mean limited coverage and revisit rates hampering the ability to react to rapidly-evolving situations. That is no longer true.
Traditionally, the answer has always been “build a bigger constellation.” But building and launching satellites takes time, even for the most experienced teams, and incurs rising costs that some nations cannot bear alone.
The technical, legal, and operational building blocks for a federated fleet already exist. Commercial SAR satellites from ICEYE are operating, and acquiring high-resolution images of the world’s most in-demand Areas of Interest (AOI) at high volume every day. Nations are running space-based ISR operation schedules, and defense partnerships have been forged across Europe and around the world.
ICEYE is delivering sovereign SAR Missions in several countries independently, building them out in parallel. As these systems become operational, nations can connect them to gain the benefits of a larger fleet delivering uninterrupted access to geospatial intelligence and increasing revisit rates to handle rapidly changing situations anywhere in the world.
Think about it this way: If you lend a piece of defense equipment, like an aircraft or vessel, it is typically unavailable for your own missions while deployed.
Satellites work differently. They orbit 24/7 around the world. With the right approach, a nation can share and tap into imaging opportunities over some AOIs while prioritizing sovereign collections over others.
We developed a simple, novel framework, together with some of our closest partners with trusted relationships, to share a few common building blocks and operate them across different chains of command efficiently.
While it sounds simple, it has also never been done before.
It’s the software and doctrine to connect national space systems securely, without compromising sovereignty, or forcing nations to rewrite their concepts of operations, while enabling shared capacity, rapid planning, and flexible, tactical joint operations.
The simplicity of our solution lies in its non-intrusive approach.
Each nation maintains full authority over how its fleet is operated and its assets are used, while making selected satellite capacity visible to participating partners across sovereign or federated operations. This framework allows national and joint planners to collaborate and synchronize efforts, ensuring the most effective allocation of available capacity within a given AOI.
Once submitted, national authorities confirm or reject plans for their capacity based on national priorities. Sovereign fleets acquire the image and downlink for processing to their own ground segment, or directly to the ground segment of the requested partner.
What makes federation possible is a single, unified software layer that makes satellite passes visible, keeps operations flexible, and ensures that visibility, authority, and execution always follow the chain of command defined by the partners.
The outcome of this new approach is that each partner gains new capabilities instantly:
While the shape of the operation may change, the outcome is simple: partners that federate ICEYE SAR missions get faster, secure, sovereign space-based ISR. They gain closer, more flexible collaboration with allies and new tactical capabilities that can be deployed anywhere with ISR Cells.
Europe is strongest when it can act, innovate and collaborate together.
There is almost no defense equipment today that is shared across nations at a tactical, operational level. With the federation of space-based ISR, we are changing that together with our partners.
And we are just getting started. In December 2025, Finland’s Ministry of Defence signed a letter of intent with Poland and the Netherlands to build international cooperation around the use of SAR satellites procured from ICEYE. This partnership is expected to form the foundation for the countries to work together and improve their monitoring and intelligence capabilities.
Join us as we federate sovereign space missions — partner by partner, operation by operation — toward the first sovereign, federated mega-constellation: iceye.com/federate.