Ukraine Tests Obria Nano Satellite to Cut Starlink Reliance

Why Ukraine wants its own satellite network

Starlink has been a lifeline for Ukrainian forces since 2022, keeping units connected where Russian attacks have destroyed cell towers and fibre. That dependence became a liability in mid-October 2026, when restrictions on the service disrupted Ukrainian connectivity and interfered with military drone operations.

Ukraine said on October 24 that Starlink and Starshield connections had returned to normal speeds. But the episode left a bigger question than any single outage: who gets to decide when a battlefield's communications stay on?

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk and US officials gave conflicting accounts of who approved the restrictions, according to TechRadar. That disagreement is arguably more telling than the slowdown itself. A country fighting a war cannot afford to have its command links subject to a policy argument it does not sit in on.

Himera, a Ukrainian defence technology company, and GomSpace, a Danish small-satellite manufacturer, are pitching Obria Nano as the answer in miniature. Himera co-founder and CEO Misha Rudominski framed it plainly: the project is "about more than launching a satellite" but about laying "the foundation for an independent communications network for Ukraine."

Obria Nano: what we know about the satellite

What Obria Nano actually is — and what it isn't

Obria Nano is an experimental spacecraft, not the start of a working constellation. It rode SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission to orbit on October 1, 2026, and Himera and GomSpace said on October 27 that in-orbit testing was underway.

The test results are meant to guide the design of follow-on satellites. The long-term plan is a constellation that provides communications coverage across Ukraine, with spacecraft and ground terminals eventually built inside the country.

The companies have not published Obria Nano's technical specifications, communications capacity, financing or the number of satellites the full network would need. That silence matters. A constellation is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar commitment, and right now there is no public number attached to this one.

It is also worth being clear about scale. Starlink operates thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit and has years of operational experience. A Ukrainian constellation would be far smaller and would not replace Starlink outright. The more realistic role is dedicated links for specific defence tasks, with commercial services filling in the rest.

The European angle: sovereignty is becoming a product

GomSpace's involvement puts this squarely in Europe's broader push for communications infrastructure that does not run through an American company's terms of service.

Denmark's GomSpace supplies small spacecraft, payloads and satellite components; Himera brings experience building military radio equipment. That pairing — a hardware maker and a defence electronics firm — is the same shape as several European sovereign-satellite efforts now taking shape.

The timing is not subtle. Europe has spent the past two years arguing about how much it should depend on US technology for defence and connectivity, and the Starlink episode gave those arguments a concrete example. For smaller countries, the lesson is that a satellite network is now part of the security budget, not just the telecom budget.

The catch is money and time. Building a constellation from scratch takes years, and Himera and GomSpace have not said who is paying or how much has been committed. Until those numbers appear, Obria Nano is a proof of concept with a compelling story attached.

What it means for you

Obria Nano is a defence project, not a consumer service. There is no pricing, no coverage map and no timeline for public availability, and neither company has said whether the future constellation would serve civilian users outside Ukraine's military and government.

For readers in the US, UK and EU, the practical takeaway is indirect: the same sovereignty argument is driving European satellite and secure-communications programmes, and those will shape what government and enterprise connectivity costs in the coming years.

Obria Nano is a small spacecraft with a large job: proving that Ukraine can build the pieces of a communications network it controls. The testing now underway will shape whatever comes next, but the decisions that really matter — funding, scale and timeline — are still unwritten.