Space is no longer a playground for the eccentric rich or a sandbox for NASA scientists with pocket protectors. It’s the plumbing. Viasat President Guru Gowrappan recently laid it out with a metaphor that sounds more like a threat than a mission statement. He called satellite communication “dual-use oxygen.”

Think about that for a second. Oxygen. If you don’t have it, you die.

It’s a grim way to describe a bunch of expensive metal boxes screaming around the planet at seventeen thousand miles per hour. But Gowrappan isn't wrong. He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. Our modern existence—the supply chains that put cheap avocados in your grocery store, the GPS that tells your Uber driver where to turn, the high-frequency trading that keeps the 401(k)s from collapsing—is entirely tethered to the sky. We’ve outsourced our nervous system to the thermosphere.

If the signal drops, the lights go out. Literally.

The "dual-use" label is where the cynicism really gets to breathe. In industry speak, dual-use means a tool that’s as good for sending memes as it is for targeting a cruise missile. It’s the ultimate sales pitch for government contracts. Viasat knows this. They watched as the KA-SAT network was gutted by a Russian cyberattack right as the invasion of Ukraine kicked off in 2022. It wasn't just a glitch. It was a lobotomy of Ukrainian military communications that accidentally bricked thousands of wind turbines in Germany.

That’s the friction. We’re building a world where a teenager in a basement or a state-sponsored hacker can theoretically turn off the "oxygen" for an entire continent.

The price of staying "breathable" is staggering. Viasat-3, the company’s latest attempt to blanket the globe in high-capacity bandwidth, is a marvel of engineering that costs roughly $700 million per satellite. That’s before you pay for the rocket. But even $700 million doesn’t buy a guarantee. The first Viasat-3 bird suffered a deployment malfunction with its massive mesh antenna. It’s a giant, silver paperweight sitting 22,000 miles away. You can’t exactly send a technician up there with a screwdriver and a can of WD-40.

This is the reality of the SatCom business. It’s a high-stakes gamble where the house always wins, provided the house can keep its hardware from exploding or being jammed.

Meanwhile, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is getting crowded. It’s a junkyard up there. Between SpaceX’s Starlink constellation and the upcoming Kuiper project from Amazon, we’re looking at tens of thousands of satellites clogging the lanes. It’s a tragedy of the commons played out in a vacuum. Every new launch adds to the "oxygen," but it also adds to the debris. One bad collision—the Kessler Syndrome scenario—and we could wrap the Earth in a lethal shell of shrapnel that makes space access impossible for a century.

So much for the oxygen tank. It’s more like a grenade with the pin pulled halfway out.

Gowrappan’s rhetoric highlights a shift in how these companies see themselves. They aren't just service providers. They’re utilities. They want to be viewed with the same somber necessity as the electric grid or the water department. It’s a brilliant move for the bottom line. If you’re a luxury, you’re optional. If you’re oxygen, you’re a line item that the taxpayer has to fund, regardless of the cost or the occasional catastrophic failure.

The trade-off is one we’ve made without a vote. We’ve traded terrestrial resilience for orbital convenience. We’ve decided that being able to stream Netflix in the middle of the Sahara is worth the risk of a global communications blackout if the sun decides to sneeze out a solar flare or if a geopolitical spat turns into a kinetic satellite-sniping contest.

We’ve built a civilization that can’t survive on the ground without a constant whisper from the stars. It’s a fragile, expensive, and increasingly crowded way to live. We’re all walking around with our heads in the clouds, pretending the air is free.

But if SatCom is oxygen, who gets to decide who holds the mask?