The European Space Agency has signed up to build and launch the European Union’s Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation.
The project, known as IRIS2, has been on the books since 2022, when the European Union found €2.4 billion (£2.1bn, $2.55bn) to fund the effort aimed at giving the bloc’s members secure space-based comms capabilities and freeing them from reliance on other nations’ infrastructure.
In July 2023 European commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager described IRIS2 as an effort to “deliver our safe internet from space.”
