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 2021.1 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.Intrigued by these developments, we conducted fieldwork at Plana Teleport and at EnduroSat—a Bulgarian nanosatellite manufacturing company—in 2023. One of us, a native Bulgarian speaker based in Sweden, has previously researched data center and internet infrastructures in the Nordic countries.2 The other, based in the United States, has studied the development of postsocialist satellite and wireless systems in Croatia, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia.3 Together, we explored Bulgaria's diverse informational landscapes to investigate not only the history of satellite systems in a postsocialist context but also the material conditions shaping satellite futures in the region. What kinds of work do satellite infrastructures perform for Bulgaria and Southeast Europe? Who owns and operates these sites? What are these infrastructures made of—and what do they make? How do processes of media distribution become materialized at and through the Plana station?Studies of postsocialist media systems have often emphasized narratives of transition, highlighting shifts in ownership, governance, and market liberalization.4 Much of this scholarship focuses on the struggles of public service and independent media to survive in troubled contexts shaped by scarce advertising revenues, opaque ownership structures, and persistent state influence.5 In these accounts, the trouble is frequently attributed to Eastern European socialism and its enduring impact on media systems and professionals.6 As a result, postsocialist media environments are often portrayed as arenas for thriving nationalism, hate speech, and authoritarianism.7 At the same time, media scholars have situated infrastructure development in the region within broader negotiations inside and beyond the Soviet sphere of influence, examining the rise of satellite and internet networks and their complex local entanglements.8These perspectives offer important insights, but they can also reinforce reductive tropes about Eastern Europe, casting media systems in countries like Bulgaria as “lagging behind” their Western counterparts or as “lacking capacities” to establish functioning information societies and participatory citizenship. Such interpretations overlook the uneven and nonlinear trajectories of media systems across the region, including Bulgaria's emergence as a regional hub for electronic engineering and satellite communications.9 There is thus a pressing need for more granular, materialist, and locally attuned approaches to media history in postsocialist contexts—approaches that do not simply rehearse narratives of economic liberalization but explore how legacy infrastructures shape and enable new forms of technological and epistemic life.10Scholars such as Bernhard Siegert and Marsha Siefert have traced the histories of “legacy infrastructures” like postal systems, telegraphy, and transoceanic cables.11 Only recently, however, have researchers begun to explore broadcasting and computing in socialist countries as twentieth-century legacy systems.12 Many socialist-era broadcast infrastructures—radio relay towers, television masts, and satellite ground stations—have fallen into disrepair, been abandoned, or become obsolete in recent years. Yet others have found “new lives” through their repurposing within contemporary digital media industries. These infrastructures continue to bear traces of their socialist, Cold War-era formation even as they now support emergent commercial media cultures.13As Svetlana Boym writes in her insightful analysis of nostalgia and postcommunism, “Technology is not a goal in itself but an enabling medium.”14 In Bulgaria, satellite infrastructure did not develop in isolation but was historically integrated with state science and technology programs, economic planning, and socialist internationalism. Once a node in the Intersputnik system designed for geopolitical coordination and national broadcasting, today the Plana station facilitates global media and data flows for a vastly different set of actors. The station is imbricated in digital capitalism, functioning as an infrastructure for regional data and entertainment services, big tech ventures, natural resource extraction, and military communication. Rather than treating legacy infrastructure as static or irrelevant, we show how such systems remain embedded in material relations that produce new trajectories of change, while also generating knowledges about those changes.In the broader context of the so-called NewSpace era—dominated by companies like SpaceX, OneWeb, and Blue Origin—this article offers a grounded counterpoint by examining satellite histories and materialities through a repurposed Intersputnik earth station in Bulgaria.15 In the process, we experiment with ways scholarly knowledges on postsocialism and satellite technologies can take shape when we move beyond institutional, corporate, or state records and toward a phenomenological-materialist approach that engages physical sites, and investigate Bulgaria's legacy we from media the work of and others of media In of the history of the media is not the of a and from to complex a of the by or in the history of and and to often or in their we take from and of we media technologies in a more recent we investigate the material and relations that satellite infrastructure in In this approach is more in with of media which is on and media is not simply a of but is an of analysis with how media technologies this as an approach that the media on their through their and is a and an of media a of and an of when media not become of approach to and time, than narratives of development or we to material work from to technology from its and grounded in the physical of often in a of that the or of the system its in and What itself as an analysis of material processes thus an analysis of the is as a situated than as an for this approach on the of media in the technologies through and are with what in or with what of to an is we investigate how satellite systems through and with and they through than in approach thus from media by a and of media that within and regional support this we to of and approach satellite infrastructure not only as and but also as of and 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Parks et al. (Thu,) studied this question.