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This has been a remarkable month for Aerospacelab. On September 10, the company was named prime contractor for the low earth orbit segment of IRIS², the European Union's secure connectivity constellation.

The contract is worth €2.4 billion and covers 264 satellites, delivered fully integrated, for an infrastructure that has to be in orbit by 2030. It is the largest contract in the history of European space, and it went to a company founded in 2018.

Most articles focused on the amount, but the number worth remembering is 264.

Until recently their satellite was closer to a project. Engineers spent years on one unit, and every unit was close to a prototype. Aerospacelab now has to deliver 264 of them in about three years, with series production ramping up from next year. That means producing roughly one satellite per day at maximal capacity. The hard part moves from engineering to production, and it brings the usual questions with it, cycle time, first pass yield, traceability, qualifying suppliers, training operators fast enough to keep the line moving.

That production will happen in Charleroi, where Aerospacelab is completing a Megafactory covering close to 20,000 m². It includes 7,000 m² of production space and 4,000 m² of cleanroom, with capacity for up to 500 satellites a year. The facility will be the largest satellite plant in Europe and the third in the world, with around 500 people needed to run it.

European sovereignty usually gets discussed in political terms. Here it has a floor area and a payroll. Whether Europe gets its own secure connectivity now depends on whether a plant in Charleroi can hold a rate of one satellite every day, and on whether it finds the people and the suppliers to do that.

This is also the kind of program A6K was built for. Our ambition is to be a reference for industrial and technological innovation, and IRIS² runs straight through three of the five themes we work on, connectivity and embedded systems, industrial performance on a real production floor, and the reliability of critical systems. A company that wants to supply a program like this has to hold tolerances, document everything and test to space grade. That usually means access to equipment and to engineering teams no single site can justify buying on its own, which is what we organize here, together with the education ecosystem on our campus, which helps train the technicians and operators such a plant relies on.

When Aerospacelab joined A6K in 2021, Benoît Deper said the point was to broaden the company's talent pool, at a time when the company had 70 employees. The same question is back at another scale. Several hundred production, quality and methods profiles have to be hired and trained, and a supply chain of precision machining, electronics, cabling, test and metrology has to meet space grade requirements at manufacturing rates. A contract this size is never only the prime contractor's business, and most of that second half is still open.

Congratulations to Benoît Deper and the whole Aerospacelab team. We have been proud to count Aerospacelab in our community since 2021, and prouder still that the largest contract in European space history will be assembled a few kilometers from here.

Eight months ago, we were celebrating another milestone from within our community, as I-care crossed a billion euro valuation after years of development. Supporting companies as they grow from ambitious projects into industrial success stories is at the heart of what we do.

The next success stories are already taking shape. Think yours could be one of them? Join us now!

↘︎ Read the related article on www.aerospacelab.com for additional perspectives and insights.