The Arctic theatre was a crucial strategic vantage during the Cold War. Amid the geopolitical turmoil a half-century later, that fact has not changed. Today, policy papers, defense department documents and press releases on mission-critical technologies have picked up on a new geopolitical priority in the High North—the kind that will rely on the technological agility of advanced satellite technologies.
“We are currently in the beginnings of something that seems like a scramble for the Arctic, with competing great powers trying to stake their claim,” said Katja Bego, senior research fellow of the International Security Programme at Chatham House. “Trump’s frequent comments about Greenland definitely fit in this pattern.”
Rare earth elements, petrocarbon and ever more crucial points of strategic proximity are thawing from the ice in the Arctic, prompting new priorities for global interests in the region. The nature and urgency of this trend could prove to be a crucial trend of this century’s history.
Speaking to SpaceNews at Salt Lake City’s Small Satellite Conference on August 11, Trond Hegrestad, director of small satellites at Norwegian military manufacturer Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace, said: “We’re looking into programs in UHF communication in the High North and future satellites for maritime surveillance.” Hegrestad insisted space is central to maintaining situational awareness in regions like the High North.
In late 2024, the company signed a contract with the European Space Agency in collaboration with the Norwegian Space Agency to develop an Arctic precursor mission for launch in 2027, a technological direction at the multinational defense giant that Hegrestad implied has seen expanded research during 2025.
Starlink lauched 24 new polar orbit satellites this July as part of mission 17-2, joining another 24 from mission 17-1 in May, which make the sixth and seventh Polar launch for Starlink in its history. That makes 289 total launched to date, most of which flew in missions 3-1 to 3-5 in 2022 and 2023, with 13 orbited as part of rideshares in 2021.
This seemingly growing trend of focusing satellite attention on the High North is being fed by a number of interrelated factors, most existential among them being the compounding certainty of ice loss in the Arctic, estimated by NASA and NOAA to represent a 12% decline per decade. The permanent loss of Arctic ice promises new shipping routes, oil fields and rare Earth extraction amid the ruin. The potential gold rush to ensue will require the same satellite position, navigation and timing technologies that modern industry and logistics have come to rely on, as well as the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance power that satellites grant governments and their militaries.
Recent excursions by Russia and China in the region suggest these powers aren’t willing to wait and see how important the territory will be and are already beginning to play their hand.
“It’s obvious that a significant threat comes down from the High North. Being able to counter that is very important.” —Andy Thomis, Cohort PLC
“It’s obvious that a significant threat comes down from the High North,” said Andy Thomis, CEO of the London-based independent defense technology group Cohort PLC. “Being able to counter that is very important. The United Kingdom is ideally placed to address it as a framework nation for the Joint Expeditionary Force. The 2025 Strategic Defense Review envisages an important role for Britain in the North Atlantic.”
A Colder War
The Defense Review Thomis cited, published by the Ministry of Defense on June 2, 2025, describes the ministry’s recognition of environmental degradation, emphasizing the particular importance of the “Arctic and High North becoming ice-free each summer by 2040, enabling access to more actors and creating a new site for competition within the UK’s wider neighborhood.”
The review addresses climate change not with skepticism but as a modern certainty, using the phrase “geographical realities.”
Observers of the region emphasize its importance as a potential epicenter of geopolitical activity.
“[The Arctic] is one of the places where many great rivals’ territories meet ,” said Chatham House’s Bego. “The Arctic provides not just the promise of vast mineral wealth and the shortest trade routes, but also the shortest routes for intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach, say, the US from Russia.”
“[The Arctic] is one of the places where many great rivals’ territories meet.” —Katja Bego, Chatham House
Today, Arctic shipping infrastructure is lacking and presents fleeting advantages. David Marsh, former technical advisor at the Wilson Center Polar Institute in D.C., who now consults for the industry, claims the Northern Sea Route through Russia and the Northwest Passage through Canada will never be the world’s primary shipping paths, but that’s not the whole story.
“There are certain city-to-city routes from East Asia to Europe [through the Arctic] that allow for shorter transit times–also avoiding the Suez Canal and the Houthi rebels in the Bab el Mandeb,” he said. “Usage of the Russian Northern Sea Route by Chinese vessels has been increasing, whilst China has built icebreakers and commissioned ice-capable LNG tankers and container ships optimized for these routes.
“Russia has been investing in infrastructure to support these vessels during their transits and charges fees of around $500k for an icebreaker escort,” Marsh said. “And the United States Coast Guard just got their first new icebreaker in decades, the Storis, which will be commissioned any day now.”
This economic buildup is taking place beneath the waves, too, as sophisticated infrastructure is constructed where it will grant the most critical advantages.
Bego noted the new development on subsea communication cables, which are experimental and very expensive, to advance connectivity and support future satellite networks. She predicted that the mounting geostrategic and economic importance of Arctic territory will expand tensions.
The aspiration to establish a so called Golden Dome above America to modernize the nation’s missile defense capacity relies on the kinds of military satellites capable of detecting and tracking such ICBM threats, which may well be best spotted from polar orbits, but isn’t unique to the territory or its present administration, with plenty of NATO members and allies similarly positioned above the equator.
“The Arctic may be one of the places where we could see an escalation between NATO and Russia first take place,” Bego said. “Russia has been remilitarizing quite significantly along the Finnish and Norwegian borders, even as it’s had to divert many resources to the war in Ukraine.”
Polar Orbit Advantage
Polar orbits pose their own logistical challenge, as do certain elliptical orbits, which also offer access to the Poles. That has made them less commercially popular and specialized for scientific or military applications.
“As more activity occurs in the Arctic, we’ll see more satellites that are optimized for it.” —David Marsh, industry consultant
“As more activity occurs in the Arctic, we’ll see more satellites that are optimized for it,” Marsh said. He cited a number of recent projects that reinforce his point:
- The Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission between the US Space Force and Space Norway in August last year;
- The European Space Agency’s Arctic Weather Satellite built by Thales Alenia Space, also launched in August last year;
- Denmark’s dedicated Arctic domain awareness satellite BIFROST in June; and
- The Japanese Quasi-Zenith navigational constellation, which uses a highly elliptical path called a Tundra orbit, used by Russia since 2000.
While mid-inclination and geostationary orbits launch eastward to take advantage of the Earth’s spin, benefitting from leagues of open sea in that direction, Polar orbits launch North and South.
“Vandenberg in the US is commonly used [for Polar launch], and the US also has a launch site on Kodiak Island in Alaska; Russia has the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Mirny; Canada is building a launch site in Nova Scotia; Norway just opened the Andøya Space Port and Sweden is close behind with Kiruna,” Marsh said.
The UK hopes to add Saxavord Spaceport on the Shetland Island of Unst, beyond the Northern coast of Scotland, to that list, backed by institutional funds and the backing of leading defense companies like Lockheed Martin.
While veteran equatorial spaceports like Cape Canaveral are best equipped and staffed, and capable of less-efficient polar launch pathways, they’re only getting more crowded, creating a potential vacuum for polar-specialist spaceports to thrive in a smaller but increasingly necessary market.
Greenland Expansionism
It’s easy to imagine how a changing threat profile in the Arctic may have influenced the escalation in interest around Greenland, which possesses significant unexploited mineral wealth of its own.
It’s easy to imagine how a changing threat profile in the Arctic may have influenced the escalation in interest around Greenland, which possesses significant unexploited mineral wealth of its own.
“The interest isn’t sudden; the US has had a military presence in Greenland since the Cold War,” Marsh said. “[America] has tried to purchase the island a few times and had territorial claims early in the 1900s. This interest is absolutely driven by the importance of the Arctic for national security reasons: missile defense, space command and control and domain awareness.”
Marsh went on to suggest another influential trend is the acceleration of the space economy, as well as Northern shipping, oil and reignited competition with Russia and China.
A New High North?
Escalation of tensions in the Arctic in step with economic expansion may be stymied by countervailing trends like the loss of ground permafrost in the Arctic Circle, changing terrain and making land construction difficult or the ensuing sea level rise from the loss of ice in the region reclaiming what solid ground the Arctic affords. Experts agreed that these will be hurdles rather than hard obstacles, and that the geopolitical reality of the region has already changed from vectors that are unlikely to lose momentum.
“The Arctic has, since the Cold War, been seen as the ‘Great exception,’ relatively free of geopolitical competition, even when tensions between the countries involved were already brewing elsewhere,” Bego said. “Up until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia and the Arctic NATO members collaborated quite productively on joint research on climate change [with the help of satellites]. That has completely changed now, and I expect competition and tensions to worsen.”
Marsh charted a pattern over the last thirty years, careening between collaboration and contention with East and West. It was an area of scientific achievement in the post-Cold War era until the War on Terror. China’s One Belt One Road program set its sights on the Arctic, and Trump’s Greenland rhetoric began to form in his first term, before attention was diverted by the War in Ukraine.
“Here we are now at another climax,” Marsh said. “But the [environmental and geopolitical] issues remain and require attention now.”
Modern defense, shipping and science have never been more reliant on satellites, and their future in the Arctic will be no exception.
Modern defense, shipping and science have never been more reliant on satellites, and their future in the Arctic will be no exception.
“Space will have an interesting role to play. China, which isn’t strictly an Arctic power but has been keen to bolster those credentials, has tried to increase its claim in the High North through scientific collaboration on space. These are, however, clear dual-use technologies at work, which the US especially worries have a secondary purpose.”
With the golden ages of Western post-war scientific cooperation with the Second World powers in the Arctic having slowed for decades, a new curtain could fall between them. It’s all the more reason not to mistake the necessity for satellite agility above this precarious theater.
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