Türkiye came out of its NATO summit with a central role in the alliance's next space network, and the contracts to match.
At the summit's Defense Industry Forum in Ankara, NATO leaders announced $4.012 billion in space and surveillance projects, anchored by a plan called HALO, for Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space. The idea is to stitch the military satellites of eight members, Türkiye, Germany, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Norway, into a single mega-constellation, sharing the cost, time and coverage that no one nation's fleet can carry alone. The alliance wants faster communications, sharper intelligence, and the ability to track missiles from orbit.
Türkiye's contribution runs through its own satellites. TÜBİTAK Space, the space arm of the national research council, will build two new high-resolution craft, İmece-2 and İmece-3, in Ankara under a contract worth more than $300 million. Based on the İmece Earth-observation satellite, they are meant to image wider areas in less time and pass back over a given spot more often, which the military values for watching borders, sea lanes and troop movements in a crisis. The original İmece, Türkiye's first home-built sub-meter imaging satellite, already flies with the Air Force as Göktürk-2B.
The bigger single line went to Aselsan. Türkiye signed more than $350 million in contracts with the firm for low-Earth-orbit satellites, secure military communications, and early-warning radar feeding the Steel Dome, the layered air-defense system Ankara is assembling. Aselsan's chief executive, Ahmet Akyol, called the job of designing NATO-grade secure communications satellites "a massive sign of global trust in Türkiye's engineering expertise."
The space push did not stop at Türkiye. NATO's deputy secretary general, Radmila Shekerinska, said Spain had joined the alliance's space-surveillance program and that a new "Starlift" effort would build a way to launch backup satellites quickly when others are lost.
The through line
The satellites fit the case Ankara pressed all week: that Türkiye's weight in NATO now rests on what it builds, as much as on where it sits. On the summit's first day, Turkish and American officials and defense executives, Lockheed Martin and Havelsan among them, met to talk about knitting their supply chains together. Deputy Defense Minister Salih Ayhan put numbers to the pitch: a Turkish defense sector past 80% domestic content, with more than 3,500 companies and over 100,000 employees. A constellation overhead is the same argument, written in orbit.