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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The AI conversation at European space conferences has been the same conversation for three cycles. A vendor describes an onboard processing demo. An institutional speaker gestures at regulatory complexity. A defence analyst invokes the U.S. primes. The panel ends with a polite consensus that the technology is promising and the policy frame is unresolved. Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was the meeting where that conversation finally moved.

It moved because the vendors came with deployed product instead of demos, and the institutional speakers came with operational use cases instead of regulatory hand-waving. The result was a more pointed question, and one European defence procurement will now have to answer publicly. Where does the human stop being in the loop, and how do you trust the machine on the right side of that line.

From demo to deployed product

The framing started on the Defense Stage tech brief from Dr. Aubrey Dunne, Chief Technology Officer of Ubotica Technologies. Ubotica is the Dublin-based AI-on-orbit company whose accelerator boards are flying on multiple European Earth observation constellations. Dunne’s brief was unusually narrow for a conference slot. Fifteen minutes on three operational use cases. Onboard processing of data captured in space. AI-managed orchestration of constellation assets. And what Dunne called “space computing and data centers in space,” reserved for later in the discussion.

The proof point was a hyperspectral maritime case the team ran in the last twelve months. A two-gigabyte raw image. Onboard segmentation of vessels using AI tiling. Extraction down to a couple of hundred bytes of structured intelligence, vessel position, orientation, beam, size. The extracted information sent down over an intersatellite link in about ninety seconds. End-to-end chain through ground in about ten minutes. The point Dunne was making was not the resolution or the model. The point was that the architecture moves a defence-relevant decision from a multi-hour ground-pass workflow to a ten-minute decision-cycle workflow.

Where the human stops being in the loop

The Defense Stage panel that followed took the same operational frame into harder territory. SpaceNews correspondent Debra Werner moderated The Role of AI in Space Defense with Guy de Carufel, CEO of Cognitive Space; Stewart Hall, Sales Director for Satellite Operations and Systems at Telespazio; Eng. Frank M. Salzgeber, Partner at Nadir Space Venture and former Vice Governor for the Space sector at Saudi Arabia’s Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST); and Dr. Marco Rocchetto, CEO of Spaceflux.

Read across what de Carufel, Hall, Rocchetto, and Salzgeber said in turn, a temporal boundary takes shape. For battle management and intercept, where the decision window is sub-second, automation is the operating model the panelists assumed. For humanitarian-impact decisions, where the consequence of an error is irreversible and the decision window is measurable in minutes or hours, the human stays in the loop. The contested middle is the minutes-to-hours range, where no panelist claimed the answer is settled.

The trust problem is the procurement problem

That is the actual blocker on the European defence procurement side. The question is not whether the model is good enough. The question is whether the model is auditable enough that a procurement officer can sign for it. Whether the inference is reproducible enough that an incident review can be conducted six months after the fact. Auditability is the missing layer around the model, not in the model.

Stewart Hall of Telespazio put the institutional case in a single line. European militaries are not going to allow decisions made by opaque code. The legal requirement, Hall said, is a chain of attribution that lets an after-action review trace any decision back to a human accountable for it. That requirement is independent of how good the model is. It is a doctrine constraint, and it is the procurement gate.

Dr. Marco Rocchetto, CEO of Spaceflux and the UK government’s preferred SDA provider since 2023, walked the room through how the layered trust problem looks in production. Pattern detection in noisy sensor data using astronomy-derived ML techniques. Predictive behavioural modelling that fingerprints individual satellites and flags anomalies in real time. And the third layer, the agentic decision tree, which Rocchetto said requires a change of doctrine before it can ship to a defence customer. The architecture is ready. The procurement framework is not.

Edge compute closes the commercial case

The Latency Arbitrage panel on the Business Stage, moderated by Dr. Eric Anderson, President of And One Technologies, worked through where the in-orbit-compute ROI actually closes. The panel was Johan Åman of Unibap Space Solutions, Vincenzo Stanzione, CTO of SITAEL, Ryan Conroy of Elve, Vincent Gagnon of Innoflight, and Viney Dhiri of D-Orbit UK.

Dhiri’s small heresy is the commercial near-term case for in-orbit compute, and it is a far smaller and sharper case than the orbital data centre vision.

The decision-quality model sits next to the sensor. The raw data gets deleted. The downlink bandwidth is saved. The storage cost is avoided. The time-to-decision compresses from minutes to seconds. That is the version of in-orbit compute that closes inside one constellation budget cycle and is in the production plan at multiple European companies right now.

The verdict from Day 2

U.S. defence AI vendors are racing to capability and scale, and have been quieter on the auditability and provenance side because U.S. procurement tolerates more opacity. European procurement does not. Member-state defence ministries, the European Commission, and the EU Space Act framework all push in the direction of explainability, lock-down, and audit.

The European AI-on-orbit company that closes the auditability gap is procurable in Europe ahead of larger U.S. competitors with more capability and fewer compliance answers. The audit layer is the moat.

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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.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The line that defined Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 came from someone who spent twenty years as an air defence pilot before he ever sat on a space-policy panel.

Donati used the line on the Defense Posture and Reaction to Space Threats panel, moderated by SpaceNews European correspondent Dr. Emma Gatti. The point lands harder coming from someone with two decades flying intercepts. European space doctrine, Donati was arguing, has been written for the wrong half of the engagement. The gray zone of proximity ops, rendezvous, and inspection is where the active fight already is.

By the end of the afternoon, every panel on the Defense Stage had moved in the same direction. The threat is operational. The doctrine has not caught up. The replenishment economics have not been priced in. The commercial-to-defence integration layer is missing. None of it was being treated as news anymore. It was being treated as the work.

Resilience replaces redundancy as the design principle

Donati walked the room through a conceptual move European militaries are making in public for the first time.

“We always thought about space in redundancy terms. We want more satellites because if one is broken or damaged we can have many more. Now we need to think about satellites working in a degraded environment, not only working or not working. You can’t always think in black or white.”

Regina Peldszus, Space Security Specialist at the European External Action Service and the policy voice on the panel, supplied the structural piece behind the reframe. Member states are already telling Brussels they have been inspected, approached, or shadowed in orbit. The diplomatic vocabulary, she said, has not caught up to what a sub-threshold incident actually looks like.

“Many of our member states have been calling out that they’ve been inspected or approached. And that’s always kind of, how close is too close? Can you really say this is a threat? There’s a lot of sub-threshold nudging going on that is very easily deniable and that you cannot attribute very easily.”

The kinetic line is clear. The cognitive line, where intent matters more than outcome, is the work of the next two years on the European side.

Replenishment velocity becomes the design metric

That distinction decides the procurement question downstream. If contested orbit is a 2030 scenario, Europe has time to build redundant exquisite assets. If it is a 2026 operating condition, Europe has to start optimising for replenishment now.

The Building Resilient Infrastructure in Space for Defense panel, moderated by Quilty Space CEO Chris Quilty, made the case in venture-side vocabulary. Jeroen Rotteveel, the founder and CEO of Delft-based ISISPACE Group, gave the day its other quotable framing.

The test Rotteveel was describing is not how many satellites a constellation has, or what each satellite can do. The test is the wall-clock interval between an asset getting taken out and its replacement being on station and producing data. Replenishment velocity is the new constellation-design metric.

Rotteveel also surfaced the dual-use vulnerability the resilience reframe makes visible. Above a certain capability tier, defence security requirements make any civilian use of the same architecture really difficult. The inverse risk is sharper. Civilian assets routed into dual-use roles become legitimate targets in conflict.

“Using civil assets in a dual-use capacity, if they all become legitimate targets in conflicts, that’s something I don’t think we’re ready for as especially a smallsat community which has always been very inclusive, maybe even a bit naïve in terms of international collaboration and cooperation.”

The naïveté, several speakers said publicly for the first time on Day 2, is now getting priced out.

Old frame, new frame

The integration layer is the real product

The Buying Commercial Services During Wartime panel, also moderated by Gatti, took the contested-orbit framing and moved it from doctrine to the integration layer. Jack Bowden, Future Mission Manager at Open Cosmos; Juan Tomás Hernani, CEO of Satlantis; Martin Langer, CEO of OroraTech; and Maxime Jambon, Chief of Staff and VP of Public Affairs at Exotrail, kept returning to the same observation. Commercial operators do not always know what defence wants. Defence does not always know what commercial can deliver. The layer that translates operationally useful data into something a person in the field can act on without a PhD in remote sensing is the actual product.

Langer, whose company has been retrofitting its civilian thermal Earth observation business for defence buyers, made the strongest version of the argument.

“If you connect to firefighters in the field, I would say 98% of the boilerplate is already there. You connect with data into the field in a fashion that people can understand without having a PhD in remote sensing.”

Hernani made the inverse case from the SATLANTIS side. Defence procurement organisations are structurally split between the user and the buyer, and the buyer has to find the solution in a market dynamic enough that no single supplier can position cleanly against a fixed requirements sheet. Langer extended the point on the same panel: “How do you find the needle in the haystack if you don’t know where to look?”

Jambon, Exotrail’s Chief of Staff and VP of Public Affairs, surfaced the practical bottleneck. “It’s super complex to get close to the operational teams. As a company, we are very far from them.” Procurement contingencies are proxied through tender language that, once the contract closes, leaves the commercial company without direct visibility into how the operational team is actually using the product. The feedback loop closes too slowly to drive the next iteration of the product.

The institutional capstone

The last conversation of the Defense Stage was a fireside chat between SpaceNews Chief Content and Strategy Officer Mike Gruss and Rear Admiral Louis Tillier, Director of the European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen) in Madrid. SatCen integrates national source assets across European intelligence services, with more coming online as national constellations launch.

The hard work of the next two years for SatCen, Tillier told Gruss, is not adding new sources. It is making the sources already in the pipeline work together when it matters. Tillier gave one statistic that made the trajectory visible. In 2011, eighty per cent of the imagery SatCen used was non-European, mainly American. Today, eighty-six per cent of the imagery SatCen uses by value comes from European providers. The shift is the European industrial base maturing into a sovereign-capable supplier tier. The bottleneck is now interoperability, not source.

Tillier closed with the day’s most useful framing of where the analyst workflow is heading. “We really need to have more streaming platforms,” he said, pairing that with a metaphor: space is entering an era of mass consumption, “and if data was treated like Michelin-starred meals in the past, in the future it will be much more consumed like fast food.”

The verdict from Day 2

Day 2 did not resolve any of the open questions. What it did was move the European space industry’s public conversation about contested operations from the hypothetical column to the operating column. Donati put the doctrine pivot in a single line. Rotteveel put replenishment velocity on the table as the new design metric. Tillier framed the SatCen integration job as the work of the next two years.

The threat is operational. The doctrine has not caught up.

It is being treated as the work.

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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.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

The honest summary of Day 1 of SmallSat Europe 2026 is that the capital is in, the technology exists, the talent is available, and none of it works without procurement reform. The Defense Stage and the Business Stage arrived at that conclusion from different angles and ended in the same place. The European space industry is now operating against a procurement architecture that was designed for a different industrial era, and the architecture is the lever that decides whether the capital pivot builds an ecosystem or simply reinforces the incumbent prime base.

That is a more pointed argument than the European space industry usually makes in public. It is also the right one.

What “the procurement is broken” actually means

Military space procurement carries classification requirements that, in practice, advantage the firms already cleared to read them. “The requirements to fulfill for secrecy are secret,” HyImpulse’s Christian Schmierer put the chicken-and-egg most plainly. A new entrant cannot bid on a requirements document it cannot access. It cannot get cleared without an existing contract. It cannot get the contract without bidding. The cleared prime, who already knows which boxes to tick, wins by default, not by intentional design, but by structural advantage that compounds over budget cycles.

That dynamic is bad for the prime contractors too. They end up bidding on the same set of programs against the same set of competitors with the same set of margins, and the innovation that European defense space says it wants happens somewhere else.

The proposed counter-move is procedural. Separate the parts of defense space procurement that genuinely need classification from the parts that do not, and procure the latter in open competition. “If you buy a car, it’s the same car that in the civilian manufacturer can buy. Doesn’t need to be classified,” Schmierer reached for the closest analogy: “If the Bundeswehr uses Deutsche Bahn to move around stuff for FedEx to send parcels, then maybe the same type of procurement could also be used for commercial space service.” The Bundeswehr already uses Deutsche Bahn to move equipment and FedEx to send parcels. Neither contract is classified.

The model that already works

The U.K. Ministry of Defence’s recent program of issuing thirteen defense space contracts to startups, each at a few million pounds, is the procurement innovation worth tracking. Small money. Large pipeline effect. The thirteen firms are now inside the MOD’s contracting orbit, with operational trust that turns into bigger contracts in subsequent budget cycles. The cost was low. The strategic value was the demand signal: the institutional declaration that the buyer was actually willing to buy from non-traditional suppliers.

ESA’s Φ-lab Investing in Industrial Innovation program is the European-level demonstration. Companies that have worked with Φ-lab have raised approximately €1 billion in private investment against €150 million of ESA co-funding over four years. A six-to-seven-times private leverage ratio. That is a working model.

The institutional design lesson from Ukraine is the same model at higher tempo. “Translate the requirements. Make them readable. Pay for the work,” former Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Kateryna Chernohorenko summarized in her Defense Stage fireside. Seven Ukrainian drone companies at the start of the 2022 invasion. Five hundred by the end of 2024. The transformation was not engineering. It was a procurement environment that translated frontline demand into contracts fast enough for industry to scale into the gap. The Ramstein coalitions Ukraine helped structure delivered €1.1 billion for IT and €2.2 billion for Drones. A space coalition along the same lines does not yet exist.

Why this matters now

Without procurement reform on the same window as the capital pivot, the math fails. Europe needs “actual programs of record being awarded to new entrants into the market, not just grants being given out to hundreds of companies,” Alpine Space Ventures’ Sven Meyer-Brunswick told the Liquidity Event panel. Without programs of record, the revenue does not arrive. Without revenue, the venture and private-equity capital that catalyzes scale-ups does not commit. Without scale-ups, the supply chain stays at its current cadence. The budget gets absorbed by the prime base that already knows how to absorb it, and the European missing-middle ecosystem the Day 1 program kept describing never gets built.

This is not theoretical. The lesson from European launcher history, concentration on a single national prime model produced the monopolization Europe is now trying to undo, is sitting in the room. The diversification choice is available. The procurement window to make it is short.

The verdict from Day 1

Procurement reform is the operative lever. What gets bought. By whom. From whom. On what terms. How fast. Europe has the budget. It has the technology. It has the political alignment. The capital pivot dated to October 2024 converts into a competitive ecosystem only if the procurement architecture changes in the same window. The decisions of the next eighteen months tell us which side of that gap European defense space lands on.

The honest answer Day 1 surfaced is that the lever is still sitting there, waiting to be pulled.

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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.