Why HALO and IRIS² Will Be Won on the Ground
8/11/2026 
Sovereign space programs, where national space assets are owned and controlled rather than leased and outsourced, are reshaping how the industry invests and plans. The satellites often earn the headlines, but what’s being specified, procured and fought over is the ground layer.
On July 7, eight NATO allies (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Türkiye) announced HALO, Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space, a plan to network national military satellites into a hybrid constellation while leaving the fleets nationally owned and controlled. This is a distinct initiative from Europe’s IRIS², where the beneficiary is the whole EU rather than a coalition of member nations, and a clear signal of Europe’s evolving sovereignty intent. IRIS², which has crossed from political mandate into physical acquisition, is now focused on critical design review and first-batch manufacturing. While both programs aim to give their governments secure satellite connectivity they own and control, HALO federating satellites that already exist while IRIS² launches new ones, the ground segment got detailed first.
The money is already confirming this movement as well. On July 29, Spain committed up to US$2.3 billion to a national secure satcom program to be folded into IRIS², days after Poland announced a US$749.5 million contribution of its own. That’s two sovereign programs in one week, each paying for its own ground control inside a shared constellation at a point when IRIS² has yet to launch any satellites or even award its LEO manufacturing prime. The satellites are still a procurement question, while the money for the ground segment is already moving.
Sovereignty Rhetoric
Any sovereign constellation which cannot land, legally, physically and interoperably, is a liability. Interoperability across eight national fleets (in HALO’s case) isn’t achieved by orbital assets alone, whatever the headlines might suggest. It’s achieved at the gateways, in key custody, in protocol translation, and through jurisdiction of traffic. IRIS² appears to have this settled, with Hispasat contracted to design, deliver and operate the governmental ground segment, including facilities to manage the orbital layers and connect them with terrestrial networks. HALO has yet to settle any of this and starts with eight separate national ground stacks.
What HALO Actually Requires
Integrating eight separate national ground stacks is the real challenge here. The requirements cover mutual gateway landing rights, interoperable and virtualized ground software, cross-nation key management, and resilient telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) across allied territory. IRIS² has already put the virtualization precedent into its own procurement documents, specifying its constellation control center as a software-only component, deployed on top of virtualized infrastructure. For now, HALO has no equivalents and it surfaces a gap where the satellites largely exist, but the agreements to land them on each other’s soil do not. The challenge for HALO and sovereign stacks like it remain in treaties and ground architecture compliance rather than the satellites themselves.
Where the Challenges Sit
Geography is the first challenge. High-latitude passes are why the Nordic membership isn’t decorative, and presence of overseas territory is why the IRIS² control framing reaches to overseas TT&C stations and owns integration of the wider ground segment. Connecting and controlling satellites over far orbit requires ground visibility and antennas in these regions.
Capacity is the second challenge. LEO systems without optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) can only move data when in view of a ground station, and for a network with a sparsely stitched together ground segment throttle throughput. The OISL architecture of IRIS² will help overcome this constraint, allowing it to route traffic across the constellation to available ground stations, but traffic can only land where landing rights are resolved.
ABI Research’s ground station tracker maps over 1,000 sites globally, and based on the current deployment, capability is not the constraint; much of the commercial majority could technically carry government traffic. The critical requirement here for IRIS² and HALO is control. The subset that sits under national ownership, with military-band access and sovereign jurisdiction over what lands there, is smaller and unevenly distributed. This distribution is what determines whether an eight-nation coalition can land its traffic on allied soil under allied control. For ground operators, the signal is clear: sovereign-capable ground stations are about to become high-in-demand strategic assets.
The Watchlist
For IRIS² and HALO, a few signals over the next 24 months will show whether this is moving in the sovereignty direction procurement documents suggest.
First, the IRIS² ground-lot awards, expected within the 2026-2027 design-review window. The one to watch for is the control lot, because whoever wins it owns the integration layer of the entire ground segment and overseas TT&C sites. They would hold the sovereign command layer. Second is HALO’s first mutual-landing or ground-interoperability agreement. HALO’s satellites already exist, so the gap is more legal than technical, the inverse of IRIS². The first signed agreement letting one member’s traffic land on another’s soil is the signal that the interoperability promise is becoming real.
History suggests that the two programs go different ways, as they follow different models. Pooling nationally owned military assets, which HALO proposes, has a consistently poor and slow record, since integration keeps foundering on national control rather than engineering. EU institutional procurement, what IRIS² is, is also slow, but it delivers: programs arrive late and over budget, yet they arrive. Galileo is the clean case, an EU civil program that took roughly two decades and exists. That pattern puts IRIS² on the side that historically gets built and HALO on the side that historically drifts.
If by the end of 2027 HALO members are each building isolated national gateways with no mutual landing rights, then the interoperability promise will have come apart on the ground, regardless of what flies in orbit. Eight HALO nations, and now IRIS²’s own member states, are buying sovereign ground control. European sovereignty in IRIS² and HALO will be won on the ground, and on current signals, IRIS² is the one winning it.
