By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Mateusz Rabiega<\/p>\n
GDANSK, Poland, April 20 (Reuters) – France and Poland will build a telecommunications satellite for the Polish military, the companies involved \u200cin the project said on Monday, as Paris and Warsaw strengthen their economic \u200cand defence ties.<\/p>\n
Thales Alenia Space, Airbus Defence and Space and Poland’s RADMOR will jointly develop a satellite in geostationary \u200borbit, which will support military communications for Poland’s armed forces.<\/p>\n
The value of the deal, announced during French President Emmanuel Macron’s meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in the Polish city of Gdansk on Monday, was not disclosed.<\/p>\n
The initiative is part of the European Commission’s flagship Readiness defence \u200cplan to get the continent \u2060ready to defend itself by 2030, the companies said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Europe has been seeking alternative, homegrown satellite services to counter global rivals and \u2060reduce reliance on Starlink amid growing concerns about the political unpredictability of its owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk.<\/p>\n
Unlike Starlink’s satellites in low Earth orbit, a geostationary spacecraft can cover large regions from \u200ba fixed \u200bposition over 30,000 km above Earth, though with \u200bslower speeds.<\/p>\n
NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IN FOCUS<\/p>\n
Macron and \u200cTusk, two of the most pro-European Union leaders in the bloc, also discussed nuclear deterrence, energy and the EU’s 150-billion-euro Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative during the summit in Gdansk.<\/p>\n
France and Poland, which has the highest defence spending as a percentage of GDP among NATO members, signed a cooperation treaty last year that includes a mutual assistance clause and a pledge to \u200cdeepen military and technological links between the two \u200bcountries.<\/p>\n
Macron said in March that France, the EU’s only \u200bnuclear-armed power, will expand its nuclear arsenal \u200band strengthen its deterrent with unprecedented cooperation with European partners.<\/p>\n
“In the \u200ccoming months, and in parallel of course \u200bwith this greater closeness \u200bin the field of nuclear deterrence, there is also what we want to do in terms of strategic support,” Macron told reporters on Monday.<\/p>\n
“It makes sense to move \u200bforward together on missile defence, \u200clong\u2011range capabilities, early\u2011warning systems, and also to look at everything we can do \u200btogether in the space domain.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro and Mateusz Rabiega in \u200bGdansk; Editing by Keith Weir and Andrew Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Mateusz Rabiega GDANSK, Poland, April 20 (Reuters) – France and Poland will build…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2347,64,712,268,709,2350,2348,9,2346,2349],"class_list":{"0":"post-2878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-poland","8":"tag-airbus-defence-and-space","9":"tag-donald-tusk","10":"tag-emmanuel-macron","11":"tag-european-commission","12":"tag-france","13":"tag-geostationary-spacecraft","14":"tag-military-communications","15":"tag-poland","16":"tag-polish-military","17":"tag-telecommunications-satellite"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}