From satellite to target in minutes: ICEYE on long-range targeting in the Nordics

Advanced long-range weapons are no better than the targeting data that guides them. Finnish company ICEYE, which operates the world's largest constellation of radar satellites, is building the capability to find the targets. Seppo Aaltonen, Vice President for NATO & Nordics Mission Systems, believes that space has gone from strategic intelligence to a tactical tool in just a few years, and that the Nordic region could become a major player by linking up its satellites.

ICEYE is a Finnish space company that makes data from space usable throughout the entire chain, from satellite to decision. The company operates what it describes as the world's largest constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. In total, ICEYE and its customers have launched 84 such satellites, several of them in recent weeks. The company is what is known as dual-use: the same satellites are used by civilian customers to manage forest fires and floods, and by armed forces for intelligence and target acquisition.

What has changed the game is price. ICEYE shrank the radar satellite to roughly a tenth of the size of a traditional reconnaissance satellite and cut the cost to a fraction of what it used to be. This has meant that small and medium-sized countries, not just major powers, can now afford the capability. ICEYE has numerous customers, among them seven NATO member states that have procured sovereign satellite systems, and the company has supported Ukraine since 2022. In January 2026, Sweden became a customer through an agreement with the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), making Sweden the first sovereign-system customer in the Nordics besides Finland.

Aaltonen's assessment of the situation is based on the war in Ukraine. Drones have made the battlefield transparent near the contact line, but only for a limited distance.

"Drones make the battlefield transparent for roughly 50 kilometres around the contact line. Beyond that, the transparency comes from space," says Seppo Aaltonen.

That is where he sees the major shift. Five years ago, space was mainly about strategic intelligence, a tool for early warning among major powers, tracking force build-ups at bases and borders over weeks and months. In Ukraine, space has moved down to the tactical and operational level.

"There are now so many satellites that you almost always have coverage, and the radar imagery is fresh. That's something that didn't exist before the war in Ukraine," he says.

Radar has an advantage that ordinary optical reconnaissance satellites lack.

"It sees through clouds, rain, snow and darkness, so you can always rely on it. That's especially valuable up here in the north," says Aaltonen.

This carries significant weight in northern Europe, in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, and not least across the Arctic and Greenland, where radar satellites can effectively monitor vast and hard-to-watch areas through darkness, clouds and snow.

The driving force is that armed forces want to be able to reach further. As more and more countries acquire long-range weapons such as cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles and rocket artillery like HIMARS, targeting data becomes the bottleneck. Range is worthless without someone to point out the target, and space has no horizon.

"The satellites see where no other sensor can reach. The alternative, sending reconnaissance aircraft deep behind enemy lines, is usually too risky given strong air defences," says Aaltonen.

ICEYE's satellites and analysis provide the data to find, confirm and verify targets, while other platforms such as drones or airborne reconnaissance track them. What is new is the pace. In military exercises, the company has demonstrated the entire chain, from satellite tasking to decision support for the customer's sensor-to-shooter process.

"We have demonstrated that today we can deliver target data in 10 to 20 minutes, and we are working hard together with our customers to make it even faster," says Aaltonen.

The speed relies on artificial intelligence (AI). ICEYE uses what the company calls ODI, Object Detection and Identification, which scans the radar images and finds and labels vessels, aircraft and vehicles, so the analyst does not have to start from the raw image.

"The AI can flag a suspected target within a few tens of seconds, and then an analyst reviews it. The human is always kept in the decision loop," he says.

The concept has been tested in exercises. During the major French exercise ORION 2026, ICEYE embedded a mobile ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) cell within a French army brigade and fed targeting data into the brigade's sensor-to-shooter chain. The company also took part in Cold Response 2026 in northern Norway, Finland and Sweden, one of the largest NATO exercises in a long time, involving around 30,000 soldiers from 14 nations.

For Aaltonen, this is in line with a Nordic way of fighting.

"We don't want to sacrifice young people in a war of attrition. Our approach is to use high technology and our expertise, and to engage the enemy at long range," he says.

That leads to the second part of the conversation: federation. The concept involves linking together different countries' military satellites, plus commercial capacity, into a shared system. The arithmetic quickly becomes compelling.

"If each country has a few satellites but links them together, the alliance gets far more capacity than any single country could afford on its own. One for all, all for one," says Aaltonen.

The model can be found in the air forces. The Nordic countries together have around 250 fighter aircraft: Gripen in Sweden, F-35 and F/A-18 in Finland, F-35 in Norway and Denmark, and they are already practising combining them through the Nordic Air Operations Concept.

"I can picture the same thing happening in space, a kind of Nordic Space Operations Concept," says Aaltonen.

The foundation is already in place. In December 2025, the Finnish Ministry of Defence signed a letter of intent with the Netherlands and Poland on cooperation around SAR satellites from ICEYE, and more countries are expected to join. ICEYE already works closely with allies such as Poland, the Netherlands and Germany, and Aaltonen sees the Baltic states as a good fit as well. He believes that Sweden now being a customer means Norway, Denmark and other NATO allies gain a well-proven concept to step into.

"Every time, it gets easier. We build up standards, train the teams, and the alliance becomes more proficient," he says.

Aaltonen also sees a broader Nordic opportunity beyond the satellites themselves, with launches from Esrange in Kiruna (northern Sweden) and Andøya in Norway, and downlink antennas in both Sweden and Norway. Federating the capabilities provides both economies of scale and military resilience, since there is less vulnerability when there is more to choose from.

Aaltonen stresses that capability is more than technology. The war in Ukraine has shown how quickly both technology and doctrine can evolve, but only through close cooperation.

"That development only happens through close partnership between industry and end users; that's how we build new capabilities in time. Going forward, it will be just as important that we, together with our allies, establish NATO standards for space and multi-domain operations," says Aaltonen.

"Having reliable allies in the same geography raises the threshold for an aggressor," he says.

That is where the opportunity lies, as he sees it: together with other like-minded and technologically advanced NATO allies, the Nordic region can see and reach further than any single country could on its own.