BRICS, explained.
A Long March-5 rocket carrying a new communication technology test satellite blasts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on 11 June 2026, Wenchang, China (Zhou Guoqiang/VCG via Getty Images)
Behind the rhetoric of Global South solidarity lies a familiar game of patron-client diplomacy.
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BRICS and the new scramble for spaceBRICS and the new scramble for space
Above Addis Ababa, a 12-metre dish (Opens in new window) swings across the sky, tracking Ethiopia’s own satellite,launched from Taiyuan in 2019 (Opens in new window), plus a growing fleet of Chinese-built ones. Beijing covered about three-quarters (Opens in new window)of the US$8 million cost as a grant. Officials now call the ground stationsomething Addis Ababa can resell (Opens in new window). At the viewing ceremony, deputy prime minister Demeke Mekonnen called the satellite (Opens in new window) “a foundation for our historic journey to prosperity,” the kind of line that patron and client both reach for, even when only one side wrote the cheque. Outside Cairo, engineers built and tested MisrSat-2 with Chinese state backing, andlaunched it in 2023 (Opens in new window).
None of this is the space race people picture because there are no flags, no moon shot, and no rival superpowers.
It’s smaller and older: a hunt for clients, dressed up as cooperation.
BRICS works hard to keep that quiet, describing its members’ space programs as the Global South finally doing what the West did first. Egypt and Ethiopia became full members of BRICS in January 2024 (Opens in new window), Indonesia a year later, officially equals at the table, though Beijing’s still negotiating one satellite, one loan, one contract at a time with each. A 2021 agreement links six satellites (Opens in new window), but it’s modest next to the bilateral deals around it.
BRICS isn’t racing the West to space. It’s reviving the West’s oldest manoeuvre, trading access for loyalty and calling it partnership.
That modesty may not last. At a BRICS space agency heads meeting in Bengaluru (Opens in new window) this June, member states revived a proposal, pushed by Russia since 2024 (Opens in new window), to formalise a standing Space Council. Roscosmos’s Yury Borisov, since replaced (Opens in new window), argued it would let members “solve tasks across these fields more expediently,” and the idea outlived him. Whether it survives the New Delhi summit (Opens in new window) in the coming days, where India holds the chair, will show whether this is real multilateralism or five bilateral deals wearing a shared BRICS logo.
China’s economy is roughly five times India’s – about US$20.9 trillion against US$4.15 trillion (Opens in new window) – and makes up something like 60% of the bloc’s output, more without Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose membership is disputed (Opens in new window). Satellites are priced in dollars, and China alone outweighs everyone else in the bloc combined. Its footprint in orbit shows the same gap: China’s built or launched satellites for Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil, Indonesia and Bolivia (Opens in new window), usually the same way: build it, train the operators, keep a hand on the ground station after the ceremony. A CSIS analysis found 64 countries (Opens in new window) engaged since 2000, three quarters of them from the Global South. As CSIS’s Matthew Funaiole put it, “this is really about who’s winning the space diplomacy race in the Global South.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the BRICS leaders' summit (MEAphotogallery/Flickr)
Russia’s a different story. Its biggest space partnership now is with Iran, and every recent Iranian launch (Opens in new window) has happened while Iranian drones fly over Ukraine, a shrinking space power bartering rocket rides for drone favours, not running a colonial project. India, meanwhile,gave its neighbours a satellite in 2017 (Opens in new window), built its own navigation system instead of signing onto BeiDou, and signed the Artemis Accords in 2023 (Opens in new window): less a rival patron than a country opting out of being anyone’s client at all.
Washington runs a nearly identical operation: theArtemis Accords (Opens in new window) passed 71 signatories this year,non-binding commitments (Opens in new window) that align signatories with American standards, the same impulse in a gentler wrapper. A signature isn’t a decade of satellite debt, but both patrons lock in clients, the difference a matter of degrees.
That’s where the “client” label needs qualifying: the hunt doesn’t land the same way on everyone. Egypt has bought satellites from Ukraine (Opens in new window),Russia (Opens in new window), France, Italy and China; if the Chinese package really trapped buyers, Cairo couldn’t shop this freely. And the lock is political. Ethiopia and Bolivia don’t have that leverage: Bolivia borrowed US$251 million from the China Development Bank against a satellite it’s still paying off, while Ethiopia followed its first satellite with a second in 2020 (Opens in new window), and now a third. They stayed because they had nowhere else to stand.
Indonesia’s playing all the angles: the Chinese satellite and training, an unresolved question over who controls the data, an Indian tracking station on Biak since the 1990s (Opens in new window). None of it is really about principle. Its “independent and active” foreign policy doctrine is a survival tactic. A middle power without enough leverage to refuse anyone, Indonesia is running the only strategy that’s ever worked while refusing to fully commit to anyone. It’s the oldest trick for a state stuck between larger ones: bank the technology, keep more than one door open, and then let yourself be fought over because being fought over beats being ignored.
So, BRICS isn’t racing the West to space. It’s reviving the West’s oldest manoeuvre, trading access for loyalty and calling it partnership, while its two biggest members trust each other too little to run that play together. What you get instead is separate deals that happen to close at the same summit. The talks in New Delhi will show whether that changes.
About the author
Vania Trixie Widodo
Vania Trixie Widodo is an Indonesian international researcher specialising in space security and governance, as well as global security affairs.
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