NATO Defense Giant Licenced To Serve Satellites for China's Military

A major European satellite company that is owned by a NATO defense contractor is licensed to service dozens of Chinese satellites belonging to a imagery provider closely tied to the Chinese military, according to a Newsweek investigation.

Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) is permitted to communicate with 42 satellites belonging to Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. Ltd. (CGSTL), China's biggest commercial satellite company, according to documents obtained by Newsweek from NKOM, the Norwegian Communications Authority.

CGSTL was jointly set up by China’s Jilin province government and a state research institute that serves China’s national defense, according to Chinese-language reports by the provincial government, the company and the institute.

The revelation comes as worldwide attention deepens on the alleged role of commercial satellite providers in helping warring parties in conflicts, including in the Iran war that was launched by the U.S. and Israel in February, attacks on shipping by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. Many of the concerns are centered on Chinese satellite companies with smaller commercial footprints.

“We know Chinese tech company Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. (CGSTL) has provided direct support to Iran-backed Houthi terrorists who have conducted attacks on U.S. interests,” a State Department spokeperson told Newsweek in December, adding, “CGSTL retains close ties to the government and military.”

On Wednesday, a U.S. congressional committee wrote to the Pentagon that Iran may be accessing information about U.S. forces in the Gulf via Western space companies, in a separate case involving Airbus Space. Airbus denied the allegations to Newsweek.

The Norwegian satellite services company declined to confirm details to Newsweek: “Our customer contracts include customary confidentiality clauses and therefore KSAT is not at liberty to publicly comment on or provide details about individual customers. This applies to both past and present customers,” a KSAT spokesperson said via email.

There is no evidence that SvalSat is currently servicing the CGSTL satellites, and Newsweek does not allege that KSAT is supporting the company.

KSAT provides uplink and downlink services for many satellites in polar orbit at its massive SvalSat ground station in the Svalbard archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic. The company is headquartered in Tromsø and is jointly owned by Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace and by state-owned Space Norway. It has significant U.S. business-in December the U.S. government announced that it had awarded Kongsberg an Air Force missile contract.

‘Illegal Communication’

But on Thursday, NKOM threatened to fine KSAT for “illegally communicating” with five satellites via SvalSat and from its TrollSat station in Antarctica.

NKOM did not identify the satellites. The KSAT spokesperson told Newsweek that the notice was not related to the CGSTL satellites.

It would be the second such fine in five months for the company. The previous incident also involved communications from Svalbard, NKOM said in a press release last December, and appeared to involved a U.S.-Italian satellite.

“It is serious that KSAT has communicated with satellites without permission on several occasions. Therefore, we are warning of a high violation fee,” NKOM department director Espen Slette said in a press statement.

“It is important that those who have permission to conduct satellite activity in Antarctica and Svalbard do so in accordance with the regulations. It is important for the trust between authorities and actors and for the trust between Norwegian and foreign authorities,” Slette said.

The NKOM documentation seen by Newsweek, which includes applications from KSAT with details of the Chinese satellites’ powerful capabilities, show that the company applied for CGSTL-related licences at least twice over the last five years-in 2021 and on September 15, 2023. The licences run to 2028, NKOM said.

“Regarding licence expiration dates, the duration of a license does not, in itself, imply continuous or full utilization throughout its term,” the KSAT spokesperson told Newsweek.

‘Absurd’ Applications

“Just filing an application to service Chinese satellites is absurd,” said John Strand, the CEO of Strand Consult, a Danish telecommunications research and advisory firm.

Strand pointed to how the 2023 license request was made 18 months after full Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, with China supporting Russia in that conflict industrially and diplomatically. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned CGSTL in December 2023 for supplying Russia’s military-industrial base. The company is also sanctioned by the EU, Japan, Switzerland, Ukraine and Taiwan.

“These satellites take pictures of ice and water in the Arctic. They aren’t monitoring agriculture,” said Strand, who reviewed the NKOM documents.

Uses given included farming and forestry production, land surveying and mapping, urban and rural construction, and statistical investigation, with the satellites operated by CGSTL and “cooperative enterprises,” according to the documentation.

“Kongsberg’s KSAT asked for permission to run Chinese spy satellites,” Strand told Newsweek. “They have been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar."

“This is a defense company providing the Europeans and the Americans. And this company now has an important role in building up European defense resilience now that we don’t want to be doing so much business with the Americans,” Strand said.

SvalSat currently services about 12 satellites belonging to Chinese companies-some of which are tied to China’s defense system-bringing the potential total to 54, Slette told Newsweek im December.

U.S. Concerns

Underlining the scale of the challenge as satellite technology becomes commercially widely available, this week, a U.S. congressional committee that scrutinizes threats from the Communist Party of China wrote to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to express concern about another European company, Airbus Space.

Michigan representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House select committee on China, said that Airbus had likely provided satellite imagery of U.S. military assets to MizarVision, a Chinese entity, days before the commencement of Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran that began on February 28. The imagery may have helped Iran target U.S. forces in the Gulf, Moolenaar said.

“While commercial satellite imagery may serve public interest purposes in some cases, unconstrained imagery provision exposing U.S. forces to heightened risk crosses a dangerous threshold,” Moolenaar wrote.

“These documented facts present a troubling scenario: 1. A Chinese firm with undisclosed satellite sourcing published precise, annotated imagery of U.S. military assets at a specific base. 2. That imagery identified the exact aircraft types that were subsequently destroyed in a precise Iranian strike. 3. A technical analysis suggests Airbus Space satellites were the most plausible sources for that imagery," Moolenaar wrote.

Airbus told Newsweek that the letter contained “many inaccuracies.”

“MizarVision has never been an Airbus customer. Furthermore, no Airbus imagery of the Middle East has ever been supplied to MizarVision or any other Chinese entities,” a spokesperson said in an email.

“We have no relationship whatsoever with MizarVision. Our operations are conducted in full compliance with all relevant sanctions, export control laws, and international regulations,” the spokesperson said.

Geopolitical Bargaining and Influence

MizarVision, based in Hangzhou, was founded as an AI-powered spatial intelligence company that uses a proprietary algorithm to sweep satellite imagery-both public and private-for signs of ships, planes and other objects of strategic interest.

It also sources free imagery from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program, and its tools are capable of tracking vessel and aircraft movements in real time using signals captured by ground receivers.

As U.S. providers delayed the release of battlefield imagery last month to avoid aiding America's adversaries in the growing war in the Middle East, MizarVision continued to publish detailed geotagged photographs of U.S. military positions at key regional bases.

In some corners of the open-source research community, especially on the Chinese and Russian sides, MizarVision's images were hailed for breaking the commercial satellite monopoly long held by the biggest Western companies.

Amid intense scrutiny in early March, however, MizarVision said it would scale back its releases as well and then delete all photographs of U.S. forces in active combat zones from its official accounts on the Weibo and WeChat Chinese social media apps.

China possesses a comprehensive satellite infrastructure, said Joseph Wen, a Taiwan-based open-source intelligence analyst who as a student mapped all known Chinese military bases and facilities and then authored a book on how to do it.

“As China continues to advance its low Earth orbit satellite constellations and broader commercial and military space capabilities, such assets are likely to become increasingly instrumental as tools for geopolitical bargaining and influence,” Wen, a non-resident fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told Newsweek in an interview.

“Although I do not have direct evidence, I believe China has clear incentives to provide satellite-derived intelligence-whether from military or commercial sources-to countries like Iran or Russia through indirect channels, including civilian partnerships or third-party transfers,” Wen said.

“While major military powers such as the United States and China possess their own dedicated military satellite systems, the primary beneficiaries of commercial satellite data are often civilian actors and countries that lack independent space-based reconnaissance capabilities-such as Taiwan and most other nations,” he said.

Increasingly, commercial firms were aligning with their home country’s national security interests to prevent their technology and images from being weaponized, Wen said.

CGSTL was set up by local authorities in 2014 in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, together with the Institute of Optics and Mechanics at the state-run Changchun Academy of Science. It remains partially state-backed to this day. Contacted by telephone, a person whose email address gave the name of Xu Xiaoran asked Newsweek to send an email with questions but did not reply to the email.

On its website, CGSTL says that it will never forget its “original mission,” which is “to serve the country through space.” Chinese space companies are part of China’s military-civil fusion system, a state policy that is steered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

More than half of its employees-53 percent-are party members and belong to the company’s own Party Committee that was set up in in 2018, according to the CGSTL website.

2026 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.

This story was originally published April 18, 2026 at 2:00 AM.