- Aerospacelab will build 264 of IRIS²’s 348 satellites, or 76% of the LEO fleet.
- The Belgian firm has grown from a 2018 startup to a €2.4 billion prime contractor.
- IRIS² is Europe’s answer to Starlink, targeting service by 2030.
Aerospacelab has been selected as a key prime contractor for the low Earth orbit, or LEO, segment of the European Union’s IRIS² secure connectivity programme, in a contract worth €2.4 billion.
The Belgian space company will design, build and deliver 264 fully integrated satellite platforms, with the constellation targeted for operational deployment from 2029 and full service by 2030. It’s the largest contract in the eight-year-old company’s history, and a serious scale-up test: Aerospacelab now has to go from building satellites in the dozens to manufacturing at genuine industrial volume.
“The selection of Aerospacelab for IRIS² reflects a deliberate industrial choice, 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,” said Benoît Deper, founder and chief executive of Aerospacelab.
The award followed a competitive dialogue with Eutelsat, which leads the LEO segment within the SpaceRISE consortium. IRIS² has grown considerably since its original December 2024 concession, which was signed for around 290 satellites at a project cost of 10.6 billion euros.
Following an August 2026 review, the European Commission and SpaceRISE expanded the constellation to 348 satellites, and the total planned investment now exceeds 15.6 billion euros. Aerospacelab’s 264 satellites make it the single largest disclosed manufacturing allocation in the programme.
The remaining 66 LEO satellites go to Airbus, while Thales Alenia Space builds communications payloads for all 330 LEO spacecraft under a roughly €500 million order announced the same day.
From Belgian startup to satellite manufacturing scale
Deper founded Aerospacelab in 2018 after an unusually varied run through the space industry: an engineering internship on NASA’s PhoneSat project at NASA Ames Research Center, three years as a Young Graduate Trainee in systems engineering at the European Space Agency, then chief technology officer at the now-defunct Swiss Space Systems.
The company has since raised more than $124 million across seven rounds, according to CB Insights, including a Series C that valued it at $566 million in May 2025. That capital has gone into its Megafactory, an industrial-scale production facility in Charleroi, Belgium, built to manufacture satellites at a volume traditional bespoke satellite makers were never designed for.
“At the heart of Europe, we have designed and are now completing our Megafactory: an industrial tool whose scale was built precisely for programmes of this magnitude. Waking up knowing that we are building Europe’s strategic future is a rare privilege,” said Deper.
IRIS² becomes Europe’s sovereign answer to Starlink
IRIS² is designed to give European governments, defence and security services, businesses and citizens a communications network the EU controls end to end, combining LEO and MEO satellites to reduce reliance on non-European infrastructure.
The European Commission awarded the 12-year concession to the SpaceRISE consortium — Eutelsat, Hispasat and SES — in December 2024.
That puts IRIS² in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink, while Europe builds a second front through Eutelsat’s OneWeb network. Tech Funding News has previously covered Eutelsat and OneWeb’s push to challenge Starlink, including the €1.5 billion recapitalisation backed by the UK and French governments. Aerospacelab’s award is one of several recent moves by European space companies chasing sovereign connectivity contracts. TFN also covered UNIVITY’s €27 million Series A for a very low Earth orbit telecom constellation aimed at the same strategic gap.
A major test for Europe’s space industry
Mathieu Costes, operating partner at AV and chairman of Aerospacelab’s board, added, called the deal “a landmark award,” adding: “This major multi-billion contract powerfully endorses Aerospacelab’s expertise and ability to deliver mission-critical space infrastructure at scale and on time.”
The three-way split between Aerospacelab, Airbus and Thales Alenia Space shows European institutions are willing to hand a meaningful share of a flagship sovereignty programme to a company that didn’t exist a decade ago, rather than keeping it entirely within the traditional aerospace primes.
Whether that vision pays off now comes down to execution: Aerospacelab has to get the Megafactory to full production capacity and deliver 264 satellites to spec on a European Commission timeline, with no previous programme of this size on its own track record to point to.
