Space Race With China Drives Antenna-Building Boom in Arctic

(Bloomberg) — Satellite operators are looking north. Way north. As the US, China and others compete in space, the need for fast and frequent communication links with satellites orbiting near the North Pole is making Arctic ground stations a hot commodity.

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That’s turned Deadhorse, Alaska, into an unlikely outpost in the space race. The community on the North Slope tundra, about 850 miles north of Anchorage by road, is the gateway to the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Virtually everything there exists to support the extraction of fossil fuels. There’s no hospital, bank or school, but there are prefab dorms for workers and a general store selling bear spray.

Deadhorse also has infrastructure for satellites, including fiberoptic cables to transmit data. “You can only put satellite dishes where there’s fiber,” said Christopher Richins, founder of RBC Signals LLC, which operates eight antennas in Deadhorse. “Otherwise, the data comes down, and it’s got nowhere to go.”

Demand is growing throughout the Arctic. “We will see more ground stations, we’ll see more dishes at existing ground stations, we’ll see more cables to provide redundancy,” said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia who does research on outer space and Arctic sovereignty.

Climate change is further opening the region to shipping and heightening its strategic importance. A Chinese shipping company plans regular summer routes through the Arctic Ocean to Europe, part of a plan for a “Polar Silk Road.” Beijing has also vastly increased the number of its polar satellites, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome space-based defense system will likely include satellites focused on the area, and the US is already handing out lucrative defense contracts for work in the north. Northrop Grumman Corp. in 2024 announced the activation of Arctic payloads for the US Space Force and has a deal worth more than $4.1 billion to make two polar-orbiting satellites by 2031. Boeing Co. in July won a $2.8 billion Space Force contract for two satellites and an option for two more, part of a $12 billion program that Space Systems Command said will include “enhanced Arctic capability.”

“What’s good about a polar orbit is you pass over every spot of the globe,” said David Marsh, founder of Washington-based consulting firm Space For Earth and an Arctic expert formerly at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “The entire Earth is rotating underneath you as you go around.”

If China or Russia were to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, “all of that is going to fly over the North Pole,” said Pierre Leblanc, a retired colonel who served as leader of Canadian Armed Forces in the Arctic. “It’s very important to have a lot of sensors that are going to be monitoring that area and sensors that have the ability to upload information.”

An ideal location to look up at orbit is Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that’s the closest sizeable habitation to the North Pole and connected via undersea cable to mainland Norway, a NATO member. The islands are home to Svalsat, the world’s largest polar satellite ground station.

However, a 1920 treaty recognizing Oslo’s sovereignty forbids Svalbard’s use for “warlike purposes.” That means “data can’t be downloaded for military use,” said Ole Kokvik, the Svalsat director.

The vulnerability of subsea cables creates another complication. A Space Norway link between Svalbard and the mainland suffered a power outage in 2022 and suspected saboteurs have targeted underwater data cables in the Baltic Sea.

Those drawbacks are fueling demand for alternatives. There are “risks being on a remote island, especially if you have submarines and ships doing whatever they do,” said Fredrik Schäder, chief business development officer of Arctic Space Technologies AB, which operates a facility in the Swedish town of Piteå, where the company installed its first antenna in 2022. The startup now has 35 there, with plans to grow to 40 next year, serving government customers and companies like Viasat Inc. and Eutelsat Communications.

Eutelsat, which operates a network competing against Elon Musk’s Starlink, last year opened a ground station in Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, with Swedish Space Corp. and local partner Northwestel.

Another hub of Canadian activity is Inuvik, population about 3,300. The Northwest Territories town is home to ground stations owned by Canada and another owned by Norway’s Kongsberg Satellite Services. Users include the French, German and Swedish governments. This year, the Inuvik Satellite Station Facility added five more dishes, which Mayor Peter Clarkson estimated took the total to 13. “Canada is setting up another dish because their dish is full,” he said.  “And then the Swedes have put up another dish. Same thing: They’re getting a broader customer base.”

C-Core, operator of another Inuvik ground station, in October announced expansion plans as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government seeks to reduce its reliance on the US.  C-Core, headquartered in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, will “serve Canadian missions for Canadians,” said Desmond Power, vice president for remote sensing.

Meanwhile, a small Inuvik-based internet service provider called New North Networks, run by local entrepreneur Tom Zubko, has acquired land in town for another ground station site. “China satellites are flying over the top of us every hour or so,” he said. “And Russian satellites are doing the same.”

Farther east, more orbital activity has increased the importance of Pituffik, a US Space Force base in Greenland used for satellite monitoring. Vice President JD Vance visited in March and said Denmark had “under-invested in the security architecture” of the island, which Trump has said the US needs to acquire.

Like Svalbard, though, Greenland depends on subsea cables vulnerable to attack — and it’s not in the US.  “You want to have a robust, modernized footprint on American (Arctic) territory,” said Elizabeth Buchanan, senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, who pointed to infrastructure growth during the administration of former President Joe Biden.

One US location is the Clear Space Force Station, about 80 miles southwest of Fairbanks. In June, the Space Force worked with the US Missile Defense Agency and US Northern Command to test a system from Clear to track intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Expecting more customers, RBC Signals wants to expand in Deadhorse, which founder Ritchins said is also home to an Amazon.com Inc. facility that’s part of the AWS Ground Station network.An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the location of its Alaska facility.

RBC Signals customers include the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Space Development Agency, according to Chief Executive Officer Ron Faith. In Deadhorse, the company started with a single antenna, now on the roof of the area’s only hotel, and the newest is a 3.9-meter antenna that began service last year.

Far north, “you can see a satellite 14-plus times a day,” he said, “whereas if you’re at a mid-latitude, you may only see that satellite four times a day.”

Construction poses its challenges. To keep out snow and winds, the sail-shaped antennas are enclosed in domes mounted on heated sheds. The structures resemble hot air balloons, tethered to the ground with steel pilings drilled 45 feet deep in case the permafrost thaws.

During construction in 2018, staff arrived one morning to see a grizzly bear stroll out of an unfinished structure. The company has since added a door (that’s kept locked), as well as a chain-link fence and barbed wire to deter human intruders.

One factor that could make Arctic stations less important is the emergence of inter-satellite links to transmit data in space before sending to a terrestrial transmitter. “All of a sudden, maybe it’s not so important to have geographically remote ground stations” so long as you have enough satellites to relay data to each other, C-Core’s Power said.

Even with such advances, satellite operators will likely keep observation points in the High North, said Marsh, the consultant who started Space for Earth. “Even with this high tech, extremely capable inter-satellite laser communications, you’re still limited by bandwidth,” he said. “It’s still best if you have a big old dish and you have a nice fiberoptic cable and you have no concerns about the amount of data you’re doing.”

–With assistance from Alan Crawford, Ott Ummelas and Jade Khatib.

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