About OreOrbit
Europe's defence runs on ten minerals, and for seven of them China controls at least one stage of the supply chain. OreOrbit shows where those minerals are mined and refined, how they reach Europe, and what is changing this week, from public data and satellite pictures.
Who is behind it
David Madali is a Prague-based analyst of the defence industry, critical raw materials and the space economy. He founded Bohemia Defense in 2024, an independent analysis project on Europe's defence industry, security and foreign policy, and built OreOrbit in 2026.
BBC News Chinese has quoted him as an analyst (July 2025). His background is in economics, economic diplomacy at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and export consulting at CzechTrade, where he set up a cluster of 12 security-industry companies.
What it is
- A live atlas of 31 mines, refineries and magnet factories, nine trade routes and the chokepoints between them.
- Satellite pictures of every site, refreshed weekly: Sentinel-2 photos, ground cleared since 2018, Sentinel-1 radar and Landsat heat maps.
- Signals every few hours: heat at the plants, ships at the chokepoints, earthquakes and disaster alerts, conflict near the supply chain.
- Monthly EU import data, export-control deadlines, a stress test, and an assessment that runs in your browser and never leaves it.
- A library of readable pages on every material and site, made to be quoted and cited.
How it works
Everything comes from public sources, named and dated on the page where it is used. An automatic updater collects and processes the data every three hours and rebuilds these pages every day. Stories found automatically are labelled as not checked. OreOrbit shows measurements and the public record; it does not forecast and is not investment or legal advice.
The full list of sources and their licences is on the legal page.
Working with us
OreOrbit is free. For defence and space manufacturers who need a defensible answer, Bohemia Defense offers a fixed-scope supply-chain risk review of one product line, supporting documentation under Article 24 of the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, and ongoing monitoring of the materials, sites and deadlines in your own register.
How to cite OreOrbit
Madali, D. (2026). OreOrbit: critical minerals from orbit. Bohemia Defense. https://bohemiadefense.com/atlas/
Each page in the library has its own citation. Figures and charts may be quoted and reused with credit to “OreOrbit (Bohemia Defense)” and a link.