On 7 July 2026, ASELSAN detailed the GÖKBAĞI system, which it describes as a Near-Orbit Satellites and Military 5G/6G Communication System. GÖKBAĞI ties a low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network to a military 5G and 6G core, with the aim of delivering secure, uninterrupted connectivity from any point on Earth – including areas where terrestrial networks are degraded or absent altogether.
ASELSAN lists the system’s headline attributes as secure and encrypted communications, high data capacity, uninterrupted connectivity while on the move, and high resilience in electronic warfare (EW) conditions. The company is the prime contractor, and its remit reportedly runs from the space segment through the ground segment, advanced satellite control centres, and the military 5G layer. The stated objective is to let every element of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) – and, in principle, the allied and partner units operating alongside them – share one secure network at the tactical level.
GÖKBAĞI is not a new program. It first surfaced publicly on 1 February 2026 at Türkiye’s 5th Global Strategies in Defence and Aviation Industry Conference, and the contract itself was signed at the SAHA 2026 exhibition earlier this year. ASELSAN held the contract’s opening meeting at its Macunköy Technology Base, and the 7 July disclosure filled in the capability picture rather than announcing a fresh award.
The value proposition, as ASELSAN frames it, is control over military communications. Turkish coverage casts GÖKBAĞI as a step toward reducing the country’s dependence on foreign systems, and the reasoning is straightforward: a national LEO constellation paired with a military 5G/6G core would, in principle, give the TSK a communications backbone that no external supplier could switch off in a crisis. Folding a military 5G/6G core into the design is also what separates GÖKBAĞI from a satellite-telephony service, in that it pushes high-bandwidth, low-latency networking down to units in the field, with the orbital layer carrying that traffic beyond the reach of fixed infrastructure. The emphasis on EW resilience follows the same thread, on the assumption that any high-intensity fight will be contested hard in the electromagnetic spectrum, where commercial or foreign-controlled links may not survive contact.
The project also enters an increasingly crowded Turkish space sector. TÜBİTAK already operates the GÖKTÜRK-1, GÖKTÜRK-2 and İMECE observation satellites in low orbit. Türkiye also placed its first indigenous communications satellite, TÜRKSAT-6A, in orbit in 2024. Plan-S, the country’s first private LEO operator, runs 16 satellites in its Connecta network and is aiming for 200, while ASELSAN is expanding its own space-based Internet-of-Things line, LUNA, whose second satellite launched aboard a SpaceX vehicle in March 2026. Baykar, through its Fergani Uzay subsidiary, is separately building toward a Starlink-style constellation of roughly 100 satellites inside five years. How these efforts are meant to dovetail – and whether they point toward a future Turkish global navigation satellite system (GNSS) – is something Ankara has not spelled out.
For now, GÖKBAĞI is a contract and a capability brief rather than an operational system. ASELSAN has not disclosed the size of the planned constellation, the orbit it will occupy, a budget, or a fielding date, and standing up and sustaining a military LEO network is a demanding task that Türkiye has not attempted at this scale before. What the 7 July reveal does confirm is intent: Ankara wants a sovereign military communications layer in orbit, and it has named the prime contractor meant to build it. The specifications, and the schedule, are what to watch from here.
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