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You are here: Home / Archives for 2026

Archives for 2026

Analyst Projects Massive Subscription Growth for Starlink Ahead of Imminent SpaceX IPO

June 5, 2026 by donmcgee

Professor Tim Farrar of TMF Associates has released a comprehensive new analysis detailing the consumer business prospects for Starlink. Published on June 5, 2026, the report arrives at a critical juncture for the commercial space sector as the industry braces for the highly anticipated SpaceX initial public offering.

The deep dive provides the first detailed geographical breakdown of Starlink’s global customer distribution, utilizing meticulous weekly monitoring of active satellite terminals to project future subscriber bases and revenues across various countries and regions.

Historic Growth and Future Trajectory

The historical data presented in the report summary illustrates a staggering pace of customer acquisition. Starlink’s global subscriber count has experienced explosive year-over-year growth, climbing from 2.3 million in 2023 to 4.4 million in 2024. The network then doubled again to reach 8.9 million users in 2025. As of the end of the first quarter in March 2026, the active subscriber base has surged to 10.3 million users.

Looking forward, the report’s headline forecast suggests that this momentum is far from slowing down. Farrar outlines a “Bull case” scenario in which Starlink could capture more than 45 million subscribers by the year 2030. Even the more pessimistic “Bear case” projection estimates that the satellite internet provider will secure a massive customer count exceeding 35 million by the end of the decade. Analysts note that Starlink may even target a doubling of its subscriber base to reach 18 million global users by the end of 2026.

Navigating Terrestrial Competition and Capacity Limits

Despite the bullish projections, the report carefully outlines the potential limitations to Starlink’s future growth. A primary challenge will be how successfully the satellite operator can compete against established terrestrial alternatives in densely populated or highly developed countries. To maintain its rapid cadence of growth, particularly in mature markets like the United States, Starlink will need to increasingly capture market share from traditional telecommunications and cable internet providers, potentially utilizing aggressive pricing strategies as a lever to attract new consumer demographics.

Furthermore, the physical limitations of orbital infrastructure remain a crucial factor. Starlink currently possesses a network capacity capable of supporting approximately 20 million broadband subscribers. Scaling beyond this threshold to reach the 40 million mark will necessitate the continued mass deployment of V2 Mini satellites utilizing the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, alongside the successful introduction of next-generation hardware architectures.

Assessing the Threat from Amazon LEO

The analysis also dedicates significant attention to the looming competitive threat posed by Amazon’s Low Earth Orbit constellation. By comparing the underlying technologies and deployment timelines of both networks, the report assesses whether there is any realistic prospect of Amazon making significant inroads into Starlink’s market dominance in the coming years.

While Amazon possesses a formidable retail presence and vast financial resources, its initial constellation of 700 satellites is projected to only support around 1.5 million broadband subscribers. This stark contrast in immediate network capacity suggests that Starlink will likely maintain a comfortable lead in subscriber acquisition, forcing emerging competitors to aggressively scale their launch cadences and orbital infrastructure if they hope to capture a meaningful share of the booming satellite broadband market.

Filed Under: Featured, Uncategorized

KSAT and iQPS Expand Strategic Alliance to Accelerate High-Frequency SAR Constellation

June 4, 2026 by donmcgee

Kongsberg Satellite Services, a premier global provider of integrated mission operations, and the Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, an innovative Japanese aerospace company, have officially announced a significant expansion of their long-term strategic partnership.

Advancing Near-Real-Time Earth Observation

Revealed on June 3, 2026, this deepened alliance is strictly focused on accelerating the development and deployment of the ambitious QPS-SAR project. The ultimate goal of this comprehensive collaboration is to establish a massive, high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar small satellite constellation that will deliver near-real-time Earth observation data services to commercial and government customers worldwide. Unlike traditional optical sensors that are often hindered by nighttime conditions or thick cloud cover, synthetic aperture radar technology provides persistent, all-weather visibility, making it an indispensable tool for time-critical remote sensing operations.

Scaling the QPS-SAR Constellation

The Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, commonly known as iQPS, has been systematically expanding its orbital footprint, with nine commercial satellites currently operational. The aggressive expansion plan targets scaling the active constellation to 24 satellites by late May 2028, ultimately culminating in a fully realized 36-satellite constellation by the year 2030.

Once fully deployed across multiple orbital planes, the comprehensive 36-satellite architecture will effectively allow the company to observe almost any selected location on the Earth’s surface at an unprecedented average interval of just ten minutes. This incredible revisit rate is designed to track rapidly evolving scenarios on the ground, allowing operators to monitor moving objects such as vehicles and maritime vessels with exceptional precision.

Leveraging Automated Ground Segment Infrastructure

To ensure the successful operational deployment of this massive scaling effort, iQPS has selected KSATlite to serve as the backbone for its future constellation expansion. Developed by Kongsberg Satellite Services, KSATlite is a fully automated Ground Segment-as-a-Service infrastructure specifically designed to accommodate the unique logistical demands of small satellites and sprawling mega-constellations.

Since the successful deployment of iQPS’s second satellite, KSAT has provided crucial Launch and Early Orbit Phase support alongside resilient global ground network coverage for mission-critical operations. Kenneth Olafsson, Head of KSAT Asia, emphasized that KSAT is deeply honored to continue supporting this rapidly scaling project, highlighting the shared vision of providing purpose-driven space capabilities that offer practical societal and strategic value.

Driving Data Convergence and Economic Value

This expanded partnership perfectly encapsulates the broader commercial space industry’s ongoing shift toward ground segment cloudification and information technology convergence. By relying on an established Ground Segment-as-a-Service model, iQPS can seamlessly scale its operations and reduce operational overhead, bypassing the enormous capital expenditures associated with building and maintaining proprietary global antenna networks.

The high-frequency data gathered by the QPS-SAR constellation possesses the potential to fundamentally revolutionize multiple industries. By efficiently delivering ultra-low-latency geospatial intelligence through KSAT’s global network, iQPS aims to unlock entirely new economic value streams. The resulting data will directly enhance urban safety, streamline global disaster response, and provide predictive analytics for agriculture and regional markets when intelligently integrated with overarching weather and economic datasets.

Instant Insight: SAR Satellites for Near Real-Time Disaster Monitoring

This above link to the video offers an excellent overview of how iQPS utilizes small SAR satellites to provide near-real-time monitoring for disaster mitigation and rapid response operations.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Beyond Gravity Launches Advanced Propulsion Pointing Mechanism for LEO Constellations

June 3, 2026 by donmcgee

Beyond Gravity has introduced a new two-axis electric propulsion pointing mechanism, designated as the APPMAX2-XS, designed specifically to meet the rigorous demands of the small satellite market operating in Low Earth Orbit.

Targeting the Small Satellite Market

Unveiled on June 3 at the Space Tech Expo USA in Anaheim, California, this latest addition to the company’s proven Advanced Electric Propulsion Pointing Mechanism family directly addresses critical industry needs for reduced mass, cost efficiency, and accelerated delivery timelines for constellation operators.

Key Technical and Operational Advantages

The APPMAX2-XS delivers several distinct operational advantages by utilizing commercial off-the-shelf components and highly industrialized production processes to ensure scalability, which guarantees a remarkably short lead time from order to delivery of less than six months. Weighing less than seven kilograms, this ultra-lightweight mechanism allows for precise two-axis thrust vectoring of small spacecraft and optical payload pointing.

This dynamic maneuverability significantly minimizes the amount of propellant wasted during attitude control maneuvers when compared to traditional fixed-mounted thrusters, ultimately optimizing fuel consumption and extending a satellite’s operational lifetime by up to two years.

Market Availability and Strategic Impact

Wolfgang Pawlinetz, Vice President of Thermal & Mechanisms at Beyond Gravity, emphasized that this low-cost, short-lead-time solution maintains full flexibility across a wide range of electric propulsion systems while delivering an exceptionally compact design. Scheduled to become available for delivery in 2027, the APPMAX2-XS is well-positioned to support the surging demand for agile, highly maneuverable small satellite constellations across both European and United States markets.

In a statement, Dominik Inschlag, director of Marketing & Sales for Beyond Gravity, said, “Our new mechanism is true a New Space enabler. We see a lot of potential for our new mechanism especially in Europe and the United States. Fast availability, low mass, and competitive cost are critical factors for constellation operators. This mechanism directly addresses those priorities,”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Amazon Leo Constellation Surpasses 330 Satellites Following Latest Atlas V Launch

June 1, 2026 by donmcgee

Amazon has successfully expanded its low Earth orbit broadband network, recently rebranded as Amazon Leo, surpassing a total of 330 satellites currently in orbit. This latest milestone was achieved following a successful deployment mission utilizing a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

Scaling Up the Mega-Constellation

The mission injected the satellites at an initial altitude of roughly 289 miles before flight control teams took over to perform health checks and gradually raise the spacecraft to their operational altitude of 392 miles. This launch marks a steady continuation of Amazon’s aggressive deployment schedule, cementing the network as the third-largest commercial satellite constellation currently operating in orbit.

Racing Against Regulatory Deadlines

The rapid cadence of these launches is driven by both commercial competition and strict regulatory requirements. Under its authorization from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon is mandated to deploy at least half of its planned 3,236-satellite constellation by July 2026. To meet this aggressive target, the company has secured over one hundred launches across multiple heavy-lift providers, including United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and SpaceX. ‘

While the company faced early delays due to bottlenecks in heavy-lift vehicle availability, the recent string of successful missions indicates that Amazon is rapidly accelerating its production and launch cadence to ensure compliance and avoid losing its valuable spectrum licenses.

Expanding Commercial Reach

Originally known as Project Kuiper, the newly rebranded Amazon Leo initiative is designed to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband internet to unserved and underserved communities globally, directly competing with SpaceX’s Starlink. As the constellation grows denser, Amazon is actively shifting its focus toward commercial rollout and enterprise partnerships.

The company recently unveiled new gigabit-speed antennas tailored for commercial aviation and has already secured major in-flight Wi-Fi contracts with airlines such as Delta and JetBlue. With continuous heavy-lift launches planned throughout the year, Amazon expects to begin rolling out preliminary broadband services to commercial customers in select latitudes before expanding globally.

Filed Under: Featured, Uncategorized

Europe has ships. SmallSat Europe said it doesn’t have ports.

May 29, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The line that organised the third day of SmallSat Europe 2026 came from a tech brief, not a panel. Stefano Antonetti, VP of Strategy & Growth at D-Orbit, walked the Business Stage tech brief through a category change his industry has been circling for two years and never quite said out loud. Europe has built ships for half a century, but it has not built ports. Everything Day 3 argued about, IRIS², protected satcom, ground-segment resilience, EUSPA’s operational pivot, sits downstream of that admission.

“In every domain on Earth, infrastructure is what enables everything else. Ports enable maritime trade. Power grids enable industrial economies. Infrastructure is not the end product, it is the platform on which all other businesses are built on.” Stefano Antonetti, VP of Strategy & Growth, D-Orbit

Antonetti said it more directly thirty seconds later. “In other words, we have ships, but we don’t have ports.” Inside the next eight hours, four other speakers in four other rooms used some version of the same frame. By the closing keynote, the unit of strategic argument had moved off the satellite and onto the infrastructure layer beneath it. That is a category shift at the level of how the industry talks about itself, and it is one of the most consequential things the conference did.

What “infrastructure” actually means in this argument

Antonetti’s case is operational. In-orbit servicing transforms a satellite from a disposable object into a manageable asset, and the moment you can interact with an asset in space, you move from missions to operations. Operations are what define every mature domain. The satellite is the ship; the servicer, the refueling depot, the optical link, and the resilient ground segment are the port. Without them, a constellation is a fleet of isolated assets drifting across an ocean.

The argument lands harder because of where it puts Europe. Antonetti is explicit about why infrastructure is the lever Europe should pull. “It is clear now that we cannot achieve the same launch cadence than Americans and Chinese are showing. And we will not be able, not in the next 20 years. So maintaining those few assets we can send into orbit in as smart a way is the way to position ourselves.”

Translate that: Europe will not out-launch SpaceX or the Chinese state, but it can out-operate them. Infrastructure is where the gap narrows.

The financial framing followed. “These investments shall be made by governments as well as on grounds where governments built roads, airports, and the highways. And these infrastructure shall be run by private entities.” The model Antonetti is reaching for is the post-war European infrastructure compact: public capital, private operation, sovereign reach.

The Layered Argument · Satellite to Infrastructure Compact

SHIP

Satellite

Old unit of argument. Disposable asset, mission-scoped.

ANTONETTI · D-ORBIT

→

SERVICER

On-Orbit Servicing

Refuel, relocate, repair, life-extend. Turns the asset into operations.

D-ORBIT

→

OPTICAL LAYER

Real-Time Network

Inter-satellite links, on-orbit compute, distributed sensors. Modern internet in LEO.

JARVIS · KEPLER

→

BACKBONE

IRIS² Multi-Orbit

Backbone and data relay connecting other constellations. Diversity at the terminal.

MIGNOLO · ESA

→

SERVICES

EUSPA Operational Layer

Galileo, Govsatcom, IRIS², EOGS. Services riding on hardened infrastructure.

ANGELLOTTI · EUSPA

PORT

Public capital, private operation, sovereign reach. The infrastructure compact Day 3 surfaced.

Source: Antonetti (D-Orbit) tech brief, Jarvis (Kepler) protected satcom brief, Mignolo (ESA) and Willems (ST Engineering iDirect) IRIS² Ground Game panel, Angellotti (EUSPA) keynote. SmallSat Europe 2026 Day 3.

The same frame, five more times

By mid-morning, the metaphor was loose in the building.

On the protected satcom tech brief that followed Antonetti’s, Beau Jarvis, Chief Revenue Officer of Kepler Communications, reframed his own company’s roadmap in identical terms. “We used to talk about the fact that we are building the internet in space, which is true, but it’s not the legacy internet, which was very limited in terms of connectivity and capability. It’s more of the modern internet in low earth orbit.” The pitch had moved from a satcom product to an infrastructure layer, including optical inter-satellite links, on-orbit compute, and distributed sensors, that other operators plug into. Jarvis closed by calling Kepler’s network “a real-time optical network that is open.” The unit of value had become the network.

In the IRIS² Ground Game session on the Business Stage, Domenico Mignolo, Head of the Technology and Products Division at the European Space Agency, made the same move on the IRIS² programme itself. He has the institutional standing to say so. “It can become very interesting when you think about this square like a backbone or a data relay to connect with other constellations. And the multi-band allows you to address the different needs.” A backbone that connects rather than competes. Koen Willems, VP of EU/NATO Programs & Government Relations at ST Engineering iDirect Europe, sitting next to Mignolo on the same panel, extended the frame to ground. “I also look at how can IRIS² in the portfolio of an end user make sure that there is an increased diversity. So, and that they can switch between different constellations.” The terminal becomes a node on a multi-orbit infrastructure, and the constellation is one input.

“Space is no longer a simple infrastructure in orbit. It is an operational tool supporting decision making, crisis management and public security.” Fabio Angellotti, Space Segment Leader, EUSPA

Fabio Angellotti, Space Segment Leader at EUSPA, speaking on behalf of Executive Director Rodrigo da Costa, closed the morning with the EUSPA keynote and the most institutional version of the argument. EUSPA, he said, “operates at the interface between infrastructure, industry, and the users.” Galileo, Govsatcom, IRIS², the future Earth Observation Governmental Service — Angellotti described each as a service layer riding on top of a hardened infrastructure base. The pivot in the EUSPA mandate the European Commission has proposed is, in his framing, the move “towards an even more operational approach, where the development of space infrastructures goes hand in hand with the delivery of secure and resilient services.” Infrastructure first, services riding on it: the same architecture Antonetti was sketching, in EUSPA legalese.

On the resilience panel later in the afternoon, Sabrina Alam, Space Lead at the SnT Technology Transfer Office at the University of Luxembourg, put the wartime version of the same argument on the table. “Space is actually what we call this first line of defense. It really underpins our critical infrastructure.” Space is the thing every other defended asset runs on. Power grids, telecom, navigation, emergency response. Alam’s argument is that those depend on space infrastructure the way an industrial economy depends on a port, and Europe has not built that base.

Five rooms, five speakers, one frame. The conference converged on a category change without explicitly debating it.

Old Unit vs. New Unit of Argument

OLD UNIT OF ARGUMENT: SATELLITE

  • Capability per spacecraft is the metric.
  • Procurement is a satellite RFP, sometimes a constellation RFP.
  • “How many satellites” is the budget question.
  • Spacecraft form factor and bus drive the supplier conversation.
  • The conversation Europe has had for 50 years.

NEW UNIT OF ARGUMENT: INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER

  • Operational continuity is the metric.
  • Procurement is a ports-roads-airports compact: public capital, private operation.
  • “What infrastructure does this constellation ride on” is the budget question.
  • Network, ground segment, servicing depots, optical backbone drive the supplier conversation.
  • The conversation the conference moved to on Day 3.

The unit of strategic argument shifted in one day.

€131 billion of post-Niinistö European defence-space capital is now sitting on top of the new unit, not the old one.

The shift matters because €131 billion of post-Niinistö-era European defense spending is in the pipeline. If sovereignty is a constellation RFP, the money buys hardware; if sovereignty is an infrastructure layer, the same money buys a sustained programme.

The platform and propulsion camps pushed back

The frame did not go unopposed. The Smallsats as a Service panel on the Business Stage, moderated by Spacewatch Global publisher and CEO Torsten Kriening, surfaced the strongest counterpoint. Dennis Moore, CCO of Reflex Aerospace, made the case for the satellite as the unit of innovation rather than the network around it.

“There is a market for software-defined applications in space, but it only makes sense and it’s only valuable if the underlying hardware fits the mission and fits the needs of the customer. So there’s no generic approach. There’s no generic solution for it. It needs to be mission specific.”

Dennis Moore, CCO, Reflex Aerospace

Moore’s argument is that infrastructure abstractions hide the part that actually decides whether a mission works, which is the spacecraft. The reflexive position reads as this: the bus, the payload integration, the platform tailoring are where European competitiveness gets built, and generic ports are the wrong unit for a sovereign defense supplier.

The active debris removal panel moderated by Chris Quilty of Quilty Space held the same level. The discussion stayed at the component level, including refueling, life extension, inspection, and partnerships, and never reached for the infrastructure abstraction Antonetti’s tech brief had opened. The on-orbit servicing tool-or-threat panel earlier in the afternoon, moderated by Jeff Foust of SpaceNews, stayed in the same component-level register. Two units of argument inside the same conference: the propulsion and platform vendors stayed with the spacecraft, while the servicing, satcom, ground-segment, and policy speakers moved up a layer.

That split tells you who is driving the category change. The operators who already think in networks and the agencies that have to procure them are pulling the conversation up a layer, while the spacecraft-platform vendors stay with the bus.

Why this is the consequential argument of the conference

Three years of European space policy have argued about which satellite to buy and from which member state. The Day 3 move is to argue about what those satellites ride on and whether Europe is buying any of it. The implication for procurement is sharp. A satellite RFP funds a prime, while an infrastructure programme funds a tier of operators, ground-segment builders, servicing companies, and optical-network providers, the missing-middle ecosystem European defense space says it wants. The architecture shapes the supplier base.

The implication for sovereignty is sharper. If sovereignty is operational continuity rather than spacecraft ownership, the question shifts from “do we build the satellite in Europe” to “can we keep operating European services when the partners step back.” That is the question Angellotti’s EUSPA framing answers, Mignolo’s IRIS²-as-backbone framing answers, and Alam’s first-line-of-defense framing answers. None of those answers fits inside a constellation RFP.

Sitting in the room is the institutional inheritance: Italy’s IRIDE programme, Spain’s Atlantic Constellation, the IRIS² ground game, the protected satcom layer Kepler is building. These read as infrastructure programmes that European agencies are now beginning to procure as infrastructure rather than as satellite procurements. The EUSPA mandate refresh and the IRIS² ground-game tender are the two clearest signals.

The verdict from Day 3

The conference performed a category change rather than announcing one. Antonetti supplied the metaphor in the Business Stage tech brief, and Jarvis, Mignolo, Willems, Angellotti, and Alam supplied the same frame in different costumes across the same morning. The propulsion and platform camps held the older line. By Friday afternoon, the unit of strategic argument on the European space stage had become the infrastructure layer.

The through-line Day 3 surfaced is that the work of the next two years is building the ports the spacecraft Europe already has can actually operate from.

If Europe builds them, it owns the rules. If somebody else builds them, somebody else does.

Key Takeaway

Day 3 of SmallSat Europe 2026 moved the European space industry’s unit of strategic argument from the satellite to the infrastructure layer. Antonetti’s ports-vs-ships frame surfaced in five other Day 3 venues, including Jarvis at Kepler, Mignolo at ESA, Willems at ST Engineering iDirect, Angellotti at EUSPA, and Alam on the resilience panel. The platform and propulsion camps held the older satellite-as-unit line. The decisions of the next two years will tell us whether Europe procures the infrastructure layer it just decided it needs.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Featured, Uncategorized

“Dual-use” is the funding word. It’s also the label operators want off.

May 29, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The label the European Commission and EUSPA have spent two budget cycles building procurement policy around got taken apart on Day 3 of SmallSat Europe 2026 by the people it is supposed to help. The dismantling came from the operators themselves. The resilience panel on the Defense Stage, moderated by Hogan Lovells partner Peter Watts, turned what was billed as a doctrine conversation into the most candid public takedown of the “dual-use” frame this funding cycle has produced. The through-line is that dual-use was supposed to unlock procurement and is now creating friction at both ends of the contract.

“Industry is now being caught up in this concept of dual use. So now every space company is now apparently defense. Everyone’s saying you’re dual use.” Sabrina Alam, Space Lead, SnT Technology Transfer Office, University of Luxembourg

That is a more pointed argument than anyone on the European institutional side has been willing to make at this conference, and it is the argument the funding side has not yet engaged.

What “dual-use” actually means in EU procurement language now

Dual-use started as a regulatory term for technologies with both civil and military application. Inside the EU’s current funding logic it has become the deciding category for who gets paid. Alam laid out the mechanic in two sentences. The European institutions, she said, “are really focused on this concept of dual use, meaning that we don’t want anything as pure war, but if you can prove a commercial value to it as well, then we’ll fund you.”

That is the funding word doing its work. Pure-defence applications are politically harder to justify under EU treaty constraints, and pure-civil applications do not access the post-Niinistö-era defence envelope. Dual-use threads the gap. The Commission and EUSPA route capital to companies that can plausibly claim both, so every European space company that wants the money has learned to claim both.

Public institutions become “the funders and the customers” at the same time, Alam said. The label meant to broaden the supplier base ends up narrowing what suppliers will publicly say their products do.

The targeting argument the agencies have not engaged

Dr. Michael “Mick” Gleason, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corporation, gave the panel its hardest single moment. The audience asked the panel directly whether dual-use assets become legitimate military targets, given that most insurance policies disclaim war risk. Gleason did not soften the answer.

“If you’re part of a military kill chain — that means you’re part of the chain of command or the chain of activities that gets a bomb on target and could kill somebody — well, you are then a legitimate military target for the entity that’s trying to defend itself. And so that’s based on international law… there’s no sanctuary in that regard.” Dr. Michael “Mick” Gleason, Senior Policy Analyst, Center for Space Policy and Strategy, The Aerospace Corporation

That is the targeting word arriving where the funding word started. The EC tells a commercial operator that what gets it paid is the defence-relevant utility of its product, and international law tells the same operator that the defence-relevant utility is precisely what makes its satellite, its ground station, and the personnel inside a legitimate object of attack. The label that opens the budget line is the label that complicates the sanctuary.

Gert Villemos, CISO and CTO of Leanspace, sharpened the point. Twenty-five years building ground segment systems, and he said what most ground-segment operators in the room already knew and had not said publicly.

“I would be prepared, we are being targeted not only [as] dual-use but even civil use. So regardless of whether it’s military, dual or civil, you are being targeted already today.” Gert Villemos, CISO & CTO, Leanspace

The dual-use debate is downstream of the actual operating condition. The civil-only sanctuary the European industry has been assuming is narrower than it used to be, and the legal regime that should follow from the targeting reality has not been written.

One Label, Two Regimes

HOW THE LABEL WORKS IN THE EC FUNDING LOGIC

  • Pure-defence applications fail EU treaty constraints.
  • Pure-civil applications miss the defence envelope.
  • “Dual-use” threads both. Money flows to companies that claim both.
  • Every commercial player learns to self-label as dual-use.
  • Public institutions become funder and customer simultaneously.

HOW THE LABEL WORKS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

  • Participation in a military kill chain is the test.
  • Once an asset feeds the kill chain, the asset is targetable.
  • The civil-asset sanctuary the industry assumed narrows.
  • Personnel and ground segments lose insurance and indemnity cover.
  • No wartime legal regime exists in most European states to operate inside.

Two separate regimes, one word.

The procurement officer and the international lawyer are both correct. Neither is talking to the other.

Two separate regimes are using the same word to mean opposite things. The procurement officer hears “commercial-grade product with a defence application,” while the international lawyer hears “civilian object that has lost protected status.” Both are correct about the word, and neither is talking to the other.

The missing legal regime

James Black, Deputy Director of Defence and Security and European Lead for Space at RAND Europe, supplied the structural piece. Of the diagnoses on the panel, Black’s is the one that should register with the Commission most.

“Lots of countries in Europe do not have the emergency legal powers in place for wartime to deal with the space of their fighting force, or to deal with space industry,” Black said. “The reality is in the military, you have this conceptual unlimited liability. You can be sent into danger because that is a national requirement. There is no such thing in the industry.”

That asymmetry is the architecture problem. The defence customer has bought a capability the supplier cannot legally operate. Health and safety law, employment law, insurance contracts: none of it lets the commercial operator keep its people in a building that is a known target. The military has unlimited liability built in, and industry has the opposite.

Ground stations, Villemos said, “are going to be taken out in day one of a major war.” Operations centre first, backup second, and Europe has built no wartime legal framework that lets industry function during that interval. Several countries have no emergency powers at all. Others have powers written in the 1940s and 1950s “when nobody had really heard of satellites.”

The Missing Legal Regime

  • Asymmetric liability: the military operates under conceptual unlimited liability; commercial space operators do not, and cannot be ordered into a known target.
  • Health and safety law: tells the ground-segment engineer to leave the facility when it becomes unsafe, directly contradicting wartime mobilisation.
  • Insurance and indemnity: most war-risk policies disclaim state-actor attacks on known industrial sites; the dual-use label narrows civilian-asset protections that underwrote the cover.
  • Emergency powers: several European countries have none at all; others rely on statutes written in the 1940s and 1950s, before satellites existed in policy.
  • Day-one targeting reality: per Villemos, ground stations are taken out on day one, backup on day two, and Europe has no legal framework that lets industry function in the interval.
  • Funding–law gap: the EC has built the funding label without the matching wartime legal regime that would let the companies it funds operate legally under attack.

The counter-frame from the agency tier

One floor up, the same word is doing very different work. Juan Carlos Cortés Pulido, Director of the Spanish Space Agency, used his closing keynote to make the institutional case for the exact label the resilience panel was examining. The Spanish Space Agency reports to both the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Ministry of Defence, and that dual reporting line, Cortés Pulido said, “is a key element in the sense that space is by definition a dual activity.”

For a civil-tier agency head, that line reads as a feature. It lets one institution coordinate procurement across two ministries with separate budgets. Col. Marcin Mazur, Vice President of the Polish Space Agency, framed the same logic from Warsaw. Asked about Poland’s sovereign capability, Mazur defined it as “the diversity of resources.” National plus “bilateral, federated or commercial sources, which supplement the information for our needs.”

Mazur and Cortés Pulido are reading the frame from where it works for them. It works at the institutional layer, where the procurement gets routed and the public-versus-defence split is the legal-political problem they are paid to solve. The disconnect is that the same word is the operating problem at the company layer, where the kill-chain question lives.

A third constituency adds a fourth reading. Sabrina Andiappane, Luxembourg Managing Director of ClearSpace, was asked on the on-orbit servicing panel whether her servicer was dual-use. Her answer was the cleanest version of the commercial side’s instinct.

“Everything we do in space is in any case dual-use. I think there’s no problem.” Sabrina Andiappane, Luxembourg Managing Director, ClearSpace

Andiappane’s frame, that dual-use is the operating baseline in space, full stop, collapses the question entirely. Every rendezvous capability is targeting capability. Every robotic arm is a grappler. Where the Spanish-Polish frame celebrates dual-use as a procurement bridge, the Aerospace-Corp frame describes it as a kill-chain trap, and the ClearSpace frame treats it as a category that has stopped doing useful work. Three constituencies, three operating definitions, one EUSPA funding stream.

The verdict

The label is doing too much work. The convergence of commercial and military capability in space is accelerating and the label points to something real, yet it is straining under three incompatible jobs at once. It routes EC funding. It narrows commercial legal sanctuary. It gets celebrated by civil agencies as a coordination bridge.

The work for the next eighteen months is the work the resilience panel was sketching. Separate what the label funds from what the label describes. Write the wartime legal regime for the companies the funding has now drawn into the kill chain. Stop asking commercial operators to self-label into a status that narrows their insurance, indemnities, and personnel protections without giving them the legal scaffolding the military operators next to them have by default.

Alam’s closing diagnosis was the one to register. Europe is “seeing a lot of fragmentation today because we’re seeing a lot of lack of understanding of this concept.” The concept gets cleaned up next, or the procurement question gets harder, the legal exposure gets greater, and the industry gets less candid about what its products do.

What the panel surfaced is that operators are asking what the label still describes. The next phase of European institutional work, including the Commission’s consultations on the EU Space Act, the post-Niinistö readiness file, and the secure-waveform programme already underway across twenty-two companies and twelve member states, is where the label gets reconciled with the law it operates under.

Key Takeaway

“Dual-use” is the deciding category for European defence-space funding and it is doing three incompatible jobs at once. The Commission routes capital through it. International law uses it to narrow civilian-asset protections. Civil agencies celebrate it as a coordination bridge. The resilience panel at SSE26, with Gleason on legitimate targets, Villemos on civil-use targeting, Black on the missing wartime legal regime, and Alam on the funding loop, argued the word has stopped describing anything stable. Separate what the label funds from what the label exposes, and write the wartime legal scaffolding the commercial layer is operating without.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Sovereignty got an answer on Day 3. Two answers, actually, and a commercial veto.

May 29, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

Day 1 of SmallSat Europe 2026 left the sovereignty debate exactly where European procurement had left it: four definitions chasing one budget line. Day 3 was the venue that gave the debate working answers, and they came from three different rooms. Spain produced one from the closing keynote, Poland produced a different one from the interview stage, and the on-orbit servicing panel produced a third, a commercial veto that says the sovereign-only frame runs into structural limits at the European liability-regime level no matter which national agency picks it up.

Three operating answers, and they do not converge on the same thing. What Day 3 surfaced was which definitions of sovereignty got operationalised by which constituency, and which got left on the floor.

Day 3 Sovereignty · By the Numbers

85%

Public-origin share of Spanish space investment

4.8%

Polish defence spending as share of GDP, highest in NATO

22

EDF secure-waveform companies across 12 member states

500

Kilogram payload class for Miura 5 first flight, French Guiana, end of 2026

5

Billion euros in the Eutelsat refinancing closed in March

Dec

ESA Ministerial decision window, six months from Day 3

“Our main objective is to achieve the strategic autonomy. And in this sense, what we are doing is basically developing capabilities.” Juan Carlos Cortés Pulido, Director, Spanish Space Agency

The Spanish answer: capability ownership

Juan Carlos Cortés Pulido, Director of the Spanish Space Agency, delivered the conference’s closing keynote on the SpaceNews Defense Stage. Sovereignty in his frame reads as capability ownership.

The Spanish agency is overseen by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and by the Ministry of Defense, and by law it coordinates the space programs of the Ministry of Defense while supporting it on technology evaluation, selection, and program launch. Eighty-five per cent of the investment in the Spanish space domain has a public origin, and that ratio is the operative answer Day 1 left open. Spain is buying the architecture.

The buying covers the full stack. Miura 5, the small launcher, makes its first flight from French Guiana at the end of this year with a 500-kilogram payload. The Atlantic Constellation, launched with Portugal, carries the Earth observation play. Indra Mind, a domestic alternative to Palantir, sits as the AI processing layer. “What we are pursuing with this is two — first of all to achieve a real-time coverage,” Cortés Pulido told the room.

What the Spanish answer requires is that Spain fund its own stack and let partners buy in on Spain’s terms. It sidesteps a single European definition of sovereignty, sidesteps IRIS² classified secure on its first generation, and sidesteps harmonised liability law across member states. The Atlantic Constellation is open, “this program is open to other members to be part of this constellation, providing assets and sharing the data,” and the architecture is Spanish.

The schedule is the closing point. Decisions get made at the ESA Ministerial in December. “We in Europe has a quite relevant sector, but we need to take decision in the coming future in order to maintain our competences and our leadership.” A six-month window.

The Polish answer: diversity of sources

Col. Marcin Mazur, Vice President of the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), sat for an interview with Mark Holmes, Senior Editorial Director at Access Intelligence, the same morning. Mazur is a serving military officer assigned to the civilian agency, and Polish defense spending now runs at almost five per cent of GDP, the highest in NATO. Holmes asked the question Day 1 left open. What does sovereign space actually mean from where Poland sits?

“From Polish perspective to sovereignty, we understand the diversity of resources. It means that it’s important to have access to several different data sources.” Col. Marcin Mazur, Vice President, Polish Space Agency (POLSA)

The Polish working definition lands somewhere different from Spain’s. Where Cortés Pulido frames the question as capability ownership, Mazur frames it as portfolio diversification: own the national assets you must own, and supplement them with bilateral, federated, and commercial sources. The CAMILA constellation, five micro-satellites POLSA will operate, with an MoD radar ISR constellation already on orbit and a new electro-optical constellation in procurement, makes up the national-asset layer. Everything else is sourcing.

“We understood that capitals cannot rely on one source of data,” Mazur told Holmes, framing the Ukraine lesson in procurement terms. “It’s important to have access to different solutions… access to different bilateral federated, or commercial sources, which supplement the information for our needs.”

That is the operational answer Day 1 never reached. Mazur is using “sovereignty” to mean single-source dependency is the failure mode, and the fix is a portfolio that survives any one supplier walking away.

Three Operating Definitions of Sovereignty

SPAIN

CORTÉS PULIDO

Sovereignty is capability ownership.

  • Build the full national stack: launcher, constellation, AI layer, ground.
  • 85% of investment is public.
  • Atlantic Constellation is open, but the architecture is Spanish.

National stack wins funding fight.

POLAND

MAZUR

Sovereignty is diversity of sources.

  • Own what you must, supplement everything else.
  • CAMILA, radar and EO national assets, the rest bilateral/federated/commercial.
  • Single-source dependency is the failure mode.
  • Defence spending 4.8% of GDP, highest in NATO.

Portfolio wins operational fight.

COMMERCIAL VETO

GRAZIANO · GMV

Sovereign-only runs into limits.

  • “Commercially there’s no space for everybody.”
  • European liability regime makes a 300-servicer market unworkable.
  • EU Space Act has not consolidated national regimes yet.
  • Constraint binds every cross-border program.

Veto sets the architectural ceiling.

The commercial veto: sovereign-only runs into structural limits

Twenty-five minutes into the on-orbit servicing panel on the Defense Stage, moderated by Jeff Foust, Senior Staff Writer at SpaceNews, the word “sovereignty” had not been said once. Chris Blackerby, Chief Operating Officer of Astroscale Holdings, flagged it. “Nobody has said the word sovereignty on this stage. So we’ve got to sovereignty 25 minutes into the presentation. So we have to say sovereignty before we finish any of these panels.”

The moment landed because of what came next. Mariella Graziano, Director of Strategy and BD of Science, Exploration and Transportation at GMV, took the question of European market fragmentation and produced the commercial counterargument the agencies on the other panels never had to address.

“Commercially there’s no space for everybody… It’s even impossible from a legislation viewpoint, regulations. We are far away from a story of liability. Europe is very complex also from the liability.” Mariella Graziano, Director of Strategy and BD of Science, Exploration and Transportation, GMV

GMV is a 41-year-old European mid-cap with offices in twelve countries that built ground segments for the second-largest commercial telco fleet in Europe and has been injecting passive servicing interfaces into Copernicus satellites for fifteen years. When Graziano said the European servicing market cannot accommodate “300 service guys and blah blah blah” because the liability regime makes it impossible, she was describing the operating constraint neither the Spanish nor the Polish answer addresses.

The point is precise. A sovereign-capability stack works at the national level for Earth observation, navigation, and SST. It works less cleanly for in-orbit logistics, where the liability and regulatory regime any servicing operator has to navigate is fragmented at the EU level. The EU Space Act is supposed to consolidate the national regimes, and it has not yet.

The veto is that sovereign-only faces structural limits for any segment of the European industry that depends on cross-border operations, and on-orbit servicing happens to be the segment that exposes the gap fastest.

The IRIS² frame: the S is for security

Koen Willems, VP, EU/NATO Programs & Government Relations at ST Engineering iDirect Europe, gave the conference’s most quotable reframe of what IRIS² is doing inside the sovereignty argument. The IRIS² Ground Game panel, moderated by Ahsun Murad of Optimal Satcom, kept landing on the architecture question, and Domenico Mignolo, Head of the Technology and Products Division at ESA, set up the frame in agency vocabulary, calling IRIS² “a backbone or a data relay to connect with other constellations.”

Willems sharpened it. “In IRIS² it is an S for security. And I think that’s one of the key elements — one is for government purpose, government end users, but given the fact that the geopolitical context and what we see around us, security becomes more important.”

The implication of that one letter doubles as the architectural answer to the sovereignty fight. IRIS² is a government-grade backbone the military community is pushing to make tactical-grade, rather than the closed, classified, secure-by-default constellation the military operators want. The European Defence Fund’s secure waveform program, twenty-two companies across twelve member states, is the workaround that bolts military capability onto IRIS² without classifying the whole constellation. The S is doing the work the four Day-1 definitions were each reaching for, and it is doing it in the procurement language IRIS² was actually written in.

The financial frame and the fragmentation tax

Wim Steenbakkers, Managing Director, Global Lead Technology at ING, sat for a fireside with Dara Panahy, Partner at Milbank LLP, on the Business Stage. The Eutelsat refinancing, five billion euros across a senior facility, export-credit financing for OneWeb satellite procurement, an EIB amendment, and a 1.5-billion-euro dual-tranche unsecured note, closed in March. Panahy asked what changed between the near-distress conversations of sixteen months ago and the deal that closed.

“I think you’ve realized that there’s actually a requirement to have these types of networks and constellations under European control and not have our cake eaten by the Americans.” Wim Steenbakkers, Managing Director, Global Lead Technology, ING

That is the financial frame’s definition of sovereignty: European control. The Eutelsat deal closed because the geopolitical case made the credit case.

Sabrina Alam, Space Lead at the SnT Technology Transfer Office at the University of Luxembourg, sat on the resilience panel and gave the day’s sharpest diagnostic. “We’re seeing a lot of fragmentation today because we’re seeing a lot of lack of understanding of this concept or what the sovereignty actually means.”

For Alam, fragmentation is the cost of letting four definitions of sovereignty share one funding stream. Agencies use the word to mean capability ownership, bankers to mean European control, architects to mean classified-by-default, and operators to mean liability you can carry. When the same word does four jobs, the budget gets allocated against the loudest definition in the room, and the next round of programs inherits the ambiguity. That is the fragmentation tax, and it is what Day 1 said the EU Space Act has roughly eighteen months to address.

The verdict from Day 3

The procurement language is leading the architecture conversation, with IRIS² as what gets built and the secure waveform program as what gets bolted on. The Polish definition is leading the operational conversation: diversity of sources is what every defense ministry in the room is actually buying. The Spanish definition leads the political-funding conversation, because capability ownership is what national parliaments understand and fund. The commercial veto is the constraint that shapes which of the three definitions any cross-border program can actually deliver against.

The through-line Day 3 surfaced is that Europe will settle sovereignty by letting the four definitions operate at four different layers, Spain at the national stack, Poland at the portfolio, IRIS² at the architecture, ING at the finance, and absorbing the cost of the gaps between them. Whether Europe can afford to pay the fragmentation tax is what the December ESA Ministerial decides.

Key Takeaway

Day 3 produced four working definitions of sovereignty at four different layers. Spain (Cortés Pulido) buys the national stack. Poland (Mazur) buys the diversified portfolio. IRIS² (Willems, Mignolo) is the architectural backbone with a secure waveform bolted on. ING (Steenbakkers) underwrites the European-control credit case. The commercial veto (Graziano) is that sovereign-only runs into structural limits at the European liability-regime level. Alam named the cost: fragmentation is what happens when one word does four jobs. The December ESA Ministerial is the decision point.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Two satellites a month, comfortably. Now the supplier tier underneath has to match.

May 28, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The Day 1 diagnosis was that European space spending had finally hit the scale that demanded a more coordinated industrial base underneath it. Day 2 was the day the European industry started attaching numbers to its answer in public, and the numbers were specific.

The morning keynote on the Business Stage came from Roberto Aceti, CEO of OHB Italia. Aceti opened with the legacy frame. OHB, he said, is the third-largest space company in Europe, with about €1.3 billion in space revenues and 3,500 employees, committed to the institutional market. Then he attached the number that landed.

“At the moment we have achieved a production rate of this satellite of two satellites a month. We can further improve. This is not really the limit, but this is a production rate that is comfortable for us.” Roberto Aceti, CEO, OHB Italia

The product Aceti was describing is OHB Italia’s contribution to IRIDE, the Italian government’s twenty-four-satellite Earth observation programme financed under PNRR with EU recovery funds. The satellites are twenty-five kilograms, dual optical and AIS payloads, sub-two-metre resolution, designed for a three-year operational life. Sixteen are already on orbit. The remaining eight ship to SpaceX in two weeks for an October launch.

Two 25-kilogram microsatellites a month for IRIDE is not a Starlink number, and it is not OHB Italia’s normal five-year institutional-tier work either. It is the rate the company has hit by deliberately designing IRIDE below the 50-kg SpaceX rideshare threshold and importing serial-production discipline into a legacy prime. Aceti was explicit on the lesson he wanted the room to take home. “If you want to be engaged in these things, you have to be super vertical.” Vertical integration, requirement-challenge discipline against the customer, and a flat decision structure that names individuals rather than functions on every non-conformance. “There is not a function. There is a guy,” Aceti said of how non-conformance reports get resolved at IRIDE pace. Those are the operating moves that compressed OHB Italia’s typical five-year project timeline to three.

OHB Italia IRIDE Production · By the Numbers

24

satellites in three years

25 kg

per satellite

Sub-2m

optical resolution

16

satellites already on orbit

2/month

production rate, comfortable

DLR funds the day after tomorrow

The day’s second institutional voice was Andres Bolte, Project Manager for Small Satellite Technologies at the German Space Agency at DLR.

“We are funding activities for small satellites, always looking at the day after tomorrow. So not looking back, not looking at the day, but actually preparing us for what is coming in the next steps.”

DLR is reaching one step further forward into pre-qualification of suppliers, processes, and components for product families that have not yet been ordered. The contracting innovation Bolte spent the second half of the brief explaining is procurement consolidation. A single integrator contract can now bundle multiple test sources and multiple production sources at the supplier tier. That lets Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers aggregate orders fast enough to justify the capex on new production lines.

The funding-to-revenue gap

The Public Purses & Policy Goals panel was moderated by Reid Whitten, managing partner of Sheppard’s London office and head of its space practice. The institutional voices were Anders Bohlin, Lead Economist for Digital Infrastructure at the European Investment Bank, and Dr. Gianluigi Baldesi, Head of ESA’s Ventures and Financing Office.

Baldesi made the most useful structural point. ESA can fund development. It cannot manufacture demand for a market segment in which it is not itself the customer. The room agreed publicly that the gap Europe has to close is no longer a development-funding gap. It is a revenue gap. Without a clear paying customer beyond the pilot, the supply base cannot scale. Without supply-base scale, the institutional buyer’s serial-production orders stay hard to fill. The loop runs the wrong direction. Closing it is the next two years of work.

The supplier-tier consolidation question

The afternoon Shoring Up the Base panel, opened by Marco Esposito of Cosine Remote Sensing, made the political-economy case underneath the funding gap. Jeroen Rotteveel of ISISPACE Group gave the most direct version of it.

“There is this new European initiative to standardize the mid-sized satellite, so they have 500 to 1000 kilogram spacecraft and there are more than 45 players in Europe established in that range. And there’s at least 25 new entrants trying to get there. And I doubt that there’s space for more than one per European country, let alone three.” Jeroen Rotteveel, CEO, ISISPACE Group

Richard French of Rocket Lab Space Systems, fresh off Rocket Lab’s acquisition of Munich-based Mynaric to form Rocket Lab Germany, layered the venture vocabulary on top.

“Constellation class manufacturing isn’t easy. You need to get through the technical valley of death. And then the production valley of death. And then hope that on the other side of that, you also can get through the market-product-fit valley of death where you actually have scale on the demand side.”

Three sequential valleys. Not every European mid-sat player will clear all three, and the procurement officer who picks the strongest contenders early accelerates the consolidation toward a healthier supplier base.

Dr. Markus Geiss, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Dcubed, surfaced the next bottleneck behind the consolidation question. “Coming from the sort of deployable side of things and adding to what was said, I think our biggest bottleneck right now is power. Affordable and available space power.” Power, not bus volume, is the constraint that the next round of European component suppliers has to clear.

The flexible factory

The Flexible Factory panel was moderated by Dr. Marco Villa, CEO of Canopy Aerospace & Defense, with Simon van den Dries of EnduroSat, Pierre Wilhelm of Aerospacelab, Pieter van Duijn of Loft Orbital, and Jack Bowden of Open Cosmos. (Luis Gomes of AAC Clyde Space was scheduled but could not make it in.) Between the four companies on stage, $400 million of private capital has been raised in the last eighteen months. The infrastructure numbers are equally specific. EnduroSat’s new 18,000-square-metre Sofia facility targets two ESPA-class satellites per day. Aerospacelab’s Charleroi megafactory clears 6,000 square metres designed around satellite throughput. Loft Orbital is running parallel work cells to absorb mission variance without ripple-effect disruptions. Bowden put Open Cosmos’s UK transformation in the most concrete terms of the day.

“In the UK now, we’ve actually transitioned fully into a moving article production line. Satellite starts in one place with subsystem build and acceptance, and at the end, the satellite comes out. Every morning I go to the office, there is a finished satellite.” Jack Bowden, Future Mission Manager, Open Cosmos

That is what serial production looks like at the smallsat tier when the design discipline, the procedure discipline, and the factory layout discipline land together. A satellite a morning is not a Starlink number, but it is the moving-article line moving.

Van den Dries, from the EnduroSat seat, surfaced the supply-chain side of the same story. EnduroSat keeps its entire supply chain within an hour’s drive of Sofia, pulling from Bulgaria’s medical-device and automotive supplier base for components older European supply chains did not staff for space-grade work. His top regulatory pain point was intra-EU export paperwork. “If I want to ship something from Sofia to Toulouse, the amount of paperwork is just crazy,” he said. The physical-space wall is now the harder one: the new 18,000-square-metre Sofia facility, he noted, is already getting called “the old building” against what the company will need next.

Radiation hardening as a business decision

Merek Chertkow, CEO of The Radiation Team, closed the engineering loop with a tech brief on Modernizing Radiation Hardening Approaches. The argument was that radiation hardening is not a parts problem. It is a business-model problem.

“On Monday, go ask your team: what is the mission assurance financial budget and schedule? And what does it buy us? If your team can’t answer this question, you have a business problem you haven’t priced in yet. The earlier you can answer this problem, the better you’re able to make the decisions that are optimised for you, whatever mission success means for you.” Merek Chertkow, CEO, The Radiation Team

That engineering posture, priced in business terms and executed at production volume, is what the European supply base is starting to internalise across every component category.

The verdict from Day 2

Day 2 was not a victory lap. It was a credible mid-cycle update. The diagnosis is shared. Institutional funding is flowing into the structural gaps. Production rates are being claimed publicly and are starting to land in the same range as the demand-side numbers. The bottleneck is now execution discipline and procurement velocity at the supplier tier underneath the primes.

OHB Italia at two a month, comfortably. Open Cosmos at a satellite a morning. The Flexible Factory four at ESPA-class daily and constellation-class weekly throughput targets. The number that decides whether the European industrial story carries through is the one that comes from the supplier tier underneath all of them. That number is not yet public. The next budget cycle is when it has to become so.

Key Takeaway

European space supply is consolidating publicly. OHB Italia ships two satellites a month, comfortably. Open Cosmos ships one a morning. The bottleneck has shifted from technology to production-discipline at the supplier tier, power, components, certification, and to procurement velocity from the institutional buyers underneath them.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Featured, Uncategorized

The orbital data center thesis just became an economics question.

May 28, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

For the last eighteen months, the orbital data centre conversation has been carried more by IPO filings and forward-looking decks than by physics. Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was the meeting where that stopped. The Business Stage spent the better part of a day pulling the thesis apart on cost, thermal, and capital-allocation grounds. The most important conversation of the morning was a tech brief delivered by a former AMD Corporate Vice President in front of a room of European investors and operators.

Struhsaker’s conclusion was not that orbital data centres are impossible. “Is it possible? Is it within what we can do? Absolutely,” he told the room. “But smart design’s going to be required.” The megawatt-class orbital data centre being financed at scale in 2026, on his read, has three engineering preconditions that have to land before the public-market thesis closes, custom silicon, modular plug-in architecture so a 5-year compute card can swap under a 20-25-year platform, and launch costs below $300 per kilogram. The version of in-orbit computing that does close commercially in the near term is a smaller, sharper, edge-compute play with a defined ROI window.

The thermal arithmetic

The brief came from Dr. Paul Struhsaker, CEO of Arrasar Partners. Struhsaker opened with his own background, which was the credential.

“In a former life I was the corporate vice president for commercial systems at AMD and one of our biggest customers was Cray Computer. The AI chip sets you see today are the product of that card-level architecture of GPUs and CPUs that came about about 12 or 13 years ago. So we’re going to talk about data centres and I’ve been in the process of building a few, so I can kind of relate the difference between all the hype and the reality.” Dr. Paul Struhsaker, CEO, Arrasar Partners

The structural argument followed from there. The case for putting compute in orbit, Struhsaker said, rests on the claim that unlimited space and unlimited solar energy will outweigh the launch cost of getting hardware to orbit. The case has a hidden assumption. Today’s GPU and accelerator silicon is designed for terrestrial data centres. It is power hungry by architecture. There are no power limitations or any power savings features whatsoever built in.

Each generation of accelerator chip has roughly doubled in power draw, Struhsaker said, walking the room through the watts-per-card numbers his slides were built around.

Struhsaker’s GPU Thermal Math · Watts Per Card

1.2 kW

Blackwell generation

2.3 kW

Vera Rubin (current)

3.0 kW

Vera Rubin (next)

6-7 m²

solar per single card

The thermal arithmetic alone makes the megawatt orbital data centre a structural-and-radiative design problem on a scale the satellite industry has never built before. Terrestrial GPU thermal envelopes hit the wall on air cooling roughly four years ago and have been moving to liquid cooling since. The orbital equivalent has to dissipate kilowatt-class waste heat across tens of thousands of accelerators by radiation alone. The next speaker on the same stage would put a sharper number against that order of structure.

The capital allocation question

The Market Brief on Orbital Data Centers Economics, delivered an hour later on the same Business Stage by Dr. Oguz Karasu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, made the explicit capital-allocation case. Karasu opened by reframing the problem statement.

“When we delve into the concept of the data centres, actually we see more at digital infrastructure rather than a normal data centre on Earth,” Karasu said. The current terrestrial data centre build-out has, on his read, completed only thirty to thirty-five per cent of its planned infrastructure. Karasu argued the orbital equivalent should be assumed to take longer still.

The physics constraints, Karasu argued, are not optional. “What’s happening in orbit, the heat only released via radiation. So to be able to keep the infrastructure cooled down all the time, for example, for 50 megawatts, big data centre, you need to have an ISS-large infrastructure. So it is technically, like physically, it’s not feasible for now. To be able to do that, you need to send a big launcher. You need to wait for Starship first. So without Starship, even the concept is not feasible for now.”

The capital-allocation case is Karasu’s second-order argument, and it carries into the rest of the day. The structural argument: multi-billion-euro investment in an orbital data centre thesis not yet physics-checked at the megawatt scale displaces investment in the gaps the rest of Day 2 spent unpacking on the same stage. Component supply-chain resilience. Serial production at the smallsat tier. Defence replenishment economics. EO fusion. Optical mesh networks. Each carries a clear customer, a defined product, and a published procurement instrument.

Two theses, same stage

Same Conference, Two Different Businesses

MEGAWATT ORBITAL DC: PUBLIC-MARKET THESIS

Replace terrestrial hyperscaler. Tens of thousands of GPU cards. Station-class spacecraft. Multi-decade asset against non-stationary debris risk. Thermal envelope is the structural bottleneck. Financed at scale. Not yet physics-checked at megawatt scale.

EDGE AI ACCELERATOR: EUROPEAN COMMERCIAL CASE

Extract intelligence, delete data. Single onboard inference unit per smallsat. Mission-sized compute envelope. D-Orbit, Ubotica, Innoflight, SITAEL already shipping. Closes inside one budget cycle.

Where in-orbit compute does close

The Latency Arbitrage panel, moderated by Dr. Eric Anderson, President of And One Technologies, did the most useful framing of the day on where in-orbit compute does close commercially. The panel was Johan Åman, CEO of Unibap Space Solutions; Vincenzo Stanzione, CTO of SITAEL; Ryan Conroy, VP of Business Development at Elve; Vincent Gagnon, Chief Revenue Officer at Innoflight; and Viney Dhiri, who runs D-Orbit UK’s space cloud business.

Dhiri, whose company has compute on multiple operational spacecraft, gave the cleanest version of the edge case.

“It’s heresy in EO circles, but take the data, extract the intelligence, delete it, get rid of it. Never want to see it again. Somebody else can store it.” Viney Dhiri, Head of Space Cloud Business Unit, D-Orbit UK

Stanzione made the technical case for federation between satellites rather than monolithic orbital data centres. SITAEL’s edge-compute model, he said, is to keep the inference workload close to the sensor and to share intelligence across satellites in a constellation. “I see as possible scenario for a large orbital data centre only something like Starlink, so managed by the usual guys we know very well. Orbital data centre service, I see it a bit far in terms of technical feasibility, opportunity and security.”

Gagnon made the engineering case for the edge thesis from the Innoflight side. Innoflight’s integrated avionics suite covers processing, networking, encryption, and radio in one architecture designed to minimise latency at the satellite level.

The verdict from Day 2

Day 2 did not end the orbital data centre conversation. It moved the conversation onto more honest ground. The megawatt vision is still on the table, but the table is now in front of a thermal engineer with a calculator and a market analyst with an opportunity-cost spreadsheet. The edge-compute version is in production planning at multiple European companies and was front of mind for several investor and operator conversations on the conference floor.

Key Takeaway

The megawatt orbital data centre thesis just became an economics question. The thermal physics requires station-class infrastructure that depends on Starship. The capital-allocation case competes with multiple better-defined European space-industry investments. The edge-compute version of in-orbit computing is shipping now and closes inside one budget cycle.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The pixel war is over. The integration war is what comes next.

May 28, 2026 by Nick Warfield

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

For most of Earth observation’s history, you bought imagery one wavelength at a time. Optical from one provider, radar from another, thermal from a third, hyperspectral from a fourth if you had a research budget and patience. Each sensor was its own program with its own ground segment, ordering interface, tasking lag, and analyst workflow. The integration happened in the customer’s organisation, after the data left the constellation. Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was the meeting where that architecture started to crack in public, and the cracks ran through four separate sessions.

Fusion replaces single-sensor

The strategic frame came from the Multi-Physics EO Stack panel, moderated by Dr. James Crawford, CSO of Privateer Space. Crawford put the technical thesis on the table at the open. The future of Earth observation is not a better optical satellite or a better SAR satellite. The future is fused multi-physics data, captured close in time across the constellation, with a common tasking layer that lets a customer ask a question once and receive an answer back from whichever sensor combination delivers the highest-signal observation.

“I work for the architect office, and we’re trying to look at the overall ecosystem in space and getting away from individual satellite missions. We’re really trying to push this working together, making sure that the systems are interoperable, that there is a common tasking, and that the inter-satellite links are there.” Vanessa Keuck, EO System Architect, European Space Agency

ESA’s job, Keuck said, is to make EU member states able to procure into a multi-physics fusion layer instead of each one building its own individual satellite mission. The upcoming procurement instrument she pointed to is an Invitation to Tender ESA expects to launch addressed at commercially enabling small-satellite missions for environmental policy.

Matthew Jenkins of Vantor, the rebrand of Maxar Intelligence after its take-private last year, made the parallel commercial case. Vantor has changed its public identity from “satellite imaging provider” to “software-enabled spatial intelligence company” precisely because the customer value has moved from the pixel to the integration. Vantor markets four pillars now. Tasking via the WorldView and recently launched Legion satellites. 2D and 3D Vivid Imagery global mosaics. Mission Enable products including the Raptor alternate PNT product and Century site monitoring. And the Tensor Globe AI platform that ties the others together.

The Cosine, KSAT, and Simera Sense voices on the panel each pivoted to the same conclusion from a different angle. Cosine’s Marco Esposito described an edge-processed multi-sensor ISR system that flags early-warning events from thermal IR and tips other modalities into action. KSAT’s representative described the Norwegian institutional Earth-observation business as a fully sovereign service delivered without owning any satellites, by fusing data from many sources. Simera Sense’s Thys Cronje, Chief Commercial Officer, described a customer that combined a thermal camera with a multispectral camera on a single platform to read refinery activity in Iran before and after strikes. Different companies. Same architectural conclusion. The product is the fused intelligence delivered into a customer workflow, not the imagery.

Optical mesh is a manufacturing problem now

Inter-satellite optical links are no longer experimental. They are a manufacturing problem. The Optical Mesh panel was moderated by Dr. Victor Aguero of Cambrian Works and was structured exactly to test how far away European production is from delivering hundreds or thousands of terminals to orbit.

The participants laid out the architecture. Mynaric (Lubos Fedora), Tesat Spacecom (Daniel Tröndle), and Cailabs (Dr. Jean-François Morizur) on the optical side. Kepler Communications (Michael Dowell) as the mission operator running commercial optical backhaul. FSO Instruments (Gus van der Feltz) and the ESTOL/SDA interop framework defining the standards. Cailabs CEO Morizur framed his company’s position plainly on stage: the 200-person France-and-US business runs optical ground stations on three continents and does not build space terminals, it connects to them.

The structural argument across the panel was simple. Launch costs have fallen far enough that small countries, companies, and even individuals can put satellites on orbit. All those satellites need to exchange information. The available RF spectrum does not scale that far. Optical mesh becomes the only viable architecture above a certain network density. The European optical-terminal manufacturers and ground-station operators on the panel were each ramping toward mass-production facilities, with the FSO Instruments speaker explicitly framing their Delft build as “ready for mass production.” The procurement signal from ESA’s IRIS² and from national defence ministries is now strong enough to underwrite the capex.

The integration layer is the product

The Making the Most of Commercial Imagery panel, moderated by Christy Monaco, Chief Operating Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium, took the integration thesis into the defence buyer’s seat. Tero Vauraste of Kuva Space, Patrick Butler of Sidus Space, Thys Cronje of Simera Sense, and Jonathan Debilde of Blacksky kept circling the same observation. The defence buyer is not asking for resolution. The defence buyer is asking for a workflow.

The procurement-pace problem followed naturally. Defence organisations move slowly. Commercial constellations move quickly. The integration layer that absorbs the speed mismatch is the actual product. Without it, the constellation operator sells imagery and the defence buyer struggles to operationalise it. With it, the constellation operator sells decisions, and the defence buyer integrates them into existing field workflows.

Anthony Baker, CEO of SatVu, delivered the tech brief that put the operational example in front of the panel. SatVu’s thermal imagery is 3.5-metre resolution, high enough to see what is happening inside structures, and Baker put the file-size number on the slide. Less than fifty megabits per tile, sometimes less. Small enough to transmit through messaging apps to a front-line user without breaking the bandwidth budget.

The verdict from Day 2

The value in Earth observation has moved from owning a sensor to integrating across sensors. From building a satellite to building a tasking platform. From owning the data to delivering the intelligence into a workflow. The constellations that win the next five years are not the ones with the highest pixel counts. They are the ones with the most defensible integration story, the cleanest API into a customer workflow, and the lowest-friction path from question to answer.

The pixel war is over. The integration war is what comes next.

Key Takeaway

Earth observation’s competitive frontier moved off the sensor in 2026 and onto the tasking and integration layer. ESA is procuring into that layer with a new ITT for commercially enabling environmental missions. Vantor restructured around it. The optical-mesh suppliers are ramping serial production to support it. The defence buyer is asking for it. The constellation operator that delivers a clean workflow wins the next five-year procurement cycle.


About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.

Filed Under: Featured, Uncategorized

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