The European Commission (EC) handed contracts to Thales Alenia Space and Aerospacelab for the buildout of the IRIS2 constellation, as EC president Ursula von der Leyen (pictured) set out the bloc’s priorities for the space sector.

Starting with Aerospacelab, the company stated it was selected as a key prime contractor for the low Earth orbit (LEO) segment of the IRIS2 programme, entrusted with building 264 satellite platforms in a deal worth €2.4 billion.

Benoit Deper, CEO of Aerospacelab, said its selection for IRIS2 “reflects a deliberate industrial choice and a defining moment for Europe as a whole”.

“Institutions are now also placing their trust in a new generation of space manufacturers: companies like Aerospacelab, built from the ground up to deliver satellite infrastructure at scale and speed,” he added.

Meanwhile, Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture owned by Thales and Leonardo, stated it had agreed a deal with Eutelsat to provide governmental payloads dedicated to 330 IRIS2 telecoms satellites in LEO.

The value of the deal is worth around €500 million, while the company expects to gain around €3 billion from the project overall.

Around 66 LEO Ka-only telecoms satellites will be launched in 2029, with Thales Alenia Space developing the payloads and Airbus Defense and Space providing the platforms.

It will also be responsible for the government payloads for a further 264 Ku/Ka telecoms satellites, scheduled to launch from 2030.

Competitive space sector
Speaking at the International Space Summit in Paris, von der Leyen said the IRIS2 programme would ensure resilient communications across Europe, strengthen digital sovereignty and reduce reliance on non-European satellite systems.

During a speech, she also set out a commitment to strengthen Europe’s access to space through greater private investment, while expressing the importance of a “strong and competitive space sector that can grow, scale up and compete globally”.

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Eutelsat and French satellite startup Skynopy officially launched what the pair claim is one of the largest software-defined ground infrastructures for current and future satellite offerings, covering in-orbit, orbital data centres and telecoms services.

Announced at the International Space Summit being held this week in Paris, the joint offering is called Global AKAR and brings together Eutelsat’s global footprint with Skynopy’s software technology and “commercial traction.”

The duo explained the ambition of the project is to utilise Eutelsat’s ground network of base stations to create a data backbone for multi-mission constellations in the S, X and Ka-bands.

The partnership aims to deploy 100 operational antennas by the end of 2029, enabling “a real-time service” at a very high throughput for the fast growing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) services market.

Global AKAR is designed to significantly reduce data latency to less than three minutes compared to the current state of the art standard of one hour, while delivering 10Gb/s throughput.

Partially supported by the French government, the project is now underway after successfully demonstrating the technical feasibility through a three-antenna proof of concept for Earth Observation.

The same infrastructure is designed to support a new generation of in-orbit services, enabling satellites to transfer data more efficiency and interact with in-orbit computing capabilities.

Customers are in line to benefit from access to a secure, high-capacity and globally distributed network without having to build out and operate their own ground infrastructures, said the partners. They further pointed to secure architecture and interfaces, making Global AKAR suitable for defence and other sensitive applications.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France, hailed Global AKAR as an alliance of a European champion in Eutelsat and one of France’s promising startups in Skynopy, “working hand in hand to offer the best service on the missing element of the space economy: the ground segment”.

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