Grey Room | Reimagining Media Historiographies and Satellite Technologies in Bulgaria: from Intersputnik to Nanosats by Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova

Reimagining Media Historiographies and Satellite Technologies in Bulgaria: from Intersputnik to Nanosats

Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova

The state-owned TV tower on Mount Botev, built in the early 1960s in Bulgaria’s Balkan Mountains, was one of the country’s first TV towers, 2007. Photograph by Ivelin Mincov. https://commons.wikimedia.org /w/index.php?curid=4077912.

Grey Room 103
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Citation

Lisa Parks and Julia Velkova, “Reimagining Media Historiographies and Satellite Technologies in Bulgaria: from Intersputnik to Nanosats,” Grey Room, no. 103 (Spring 2026): 70–101.

Filed under media, politics

In 2023, a retrofitted satellite earth station in Bulgaria received international acclaim as the world’s fastest-growing satellite interconnection service provider. Originally inaugurated in 1977 as part of the Soviet-led Intersputnik network, the station—now known as Plana Teleport—reported a 24 percent revenue increase between 2020 and 2021. This growth reflects the station’s strategic diversification into a broad portfolio of services, which has attracted clients ranging from Disney, Paramount, SpaceX, and Eutelsat to national governments, universities, and private shipping companies. Plana Teleport’s recent commercial success has not only earned it global recognition but has also repositioned the site as a critical regional hub for broadcasting and data distribution across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. As such, the station’s trajectory exemplifies how repurposed Cold War–era infrastructure can be mobilized in contemporary projects of neoliberal development, technological nationalism, and regional economic transformation.

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