Taking space out of a time warp

When Benoît Deper returned to Europe after working at NASA and a satellite startup in California, he faced two obvious choices: join the European Space Agency or a traditional aerospace giant. Missing the buzz of the startup scene, he chose a third, more challenging option – founding his own company.

"I wasn't finding this very early-stage, innovative environment that I had experienced at NASA and in the startup scene in the San Francisco Bay Area," says Deper. "I thought there was definitely a need for these kinds of players in Europe, and nobody was doing that."

That realisation led Deper to create Aerospacelab in 2018, one of Europe's most promising space technology companies. Today, with Deper as chief executive, the company employs around 350 people – a workforce that’s growing by about five people per week – and has ten satellites in orbit, with ambitious plans to increase production dramatically in the coming years.

The space industry, Deper argues, has been stuck in a pre-industrial time warp. “It’s a bit like the car industry 100 years ago, before Henry Ford started to mass-manufacture cars,” he says. “It was super expensive, relatively low quality, and people just said: ‘This is the way it is.’”

Traditional satellite manufacturing involves complex organisational structures, endless funding stages and a fragile chain of specialised suppliers. If a single small supplier fails, an entire programme can grind to a halt, often running years late and millions over budget.

Aerospacelab's solution combines vertical integration with standardisation. The company manufactures its own components in-house – from telescope mirrors to solar cells and electronic boards – relying only on raw materials like titanium and aluminium from external suppliers. This approach gives the company complete control over its supply chain and production timelines.

"We don't have to track small and medium-sized enterprises trying to do that transformation, because we do it ourselves," says Deper. The result: quality satellites produced much faster that cost just a fraction of traditional models, not through reduced performance, but through manufacturing efficiency.

Another key difference is Aerospacelab's willingness to invest ahead of customer demand. While traditional satellite companies don’t start work until they’ve signed a contract, Aerospacelab pre-invests in technology development, anticipating what customers will need two or three years down the road.

"Our competitors, especially the legacy ones, wait to get funding before they start working on those projects," Deper says. "In our case, we bet that we can work self-funded ahead of time, so that we will be ready when the customer needs us."

This strategy caught the eye of experts at the European Investment Bank. “The CEO is very impressive. He’s a visionary,” says Luis Cervera Lozano, the EIB venture banker who structured and executed the financing deal signed with Aerospacelab by the EU's financing arm this year. “Years ahead of the curve, he anticipated the industry's transition from nano- to microsatellites. He recognised microsatellites as the optimal structure for most missions, effectively balancing performance with economic viability. Crucially, he understood that shifting to microsatellites would allow industrial-scale production that eliminates the high non-recurring engineering costs that often hinder nanosatellite development.”

And it is a strategy that’s paying off. Aerospacelab recently launched an advanced hyperspectral imaging satellite for the European Space Agency that can reveal the chemical composition of objects on Earth. The company's order book is growing rapidly, with constellation orders (groups of satellites working as a system) covering a wide range of space applications.

To meet this demand, Aerospacelab is constructing its very own "megafactory" in Charleroi, Belgium, designed for true mass production of satellites ranging from 50 kgs to 1 000 kgs. Alongside this expansion, the European Investment Bank has provided €37.5 million in venture debt financing, backed by InvestEU, the EU's flagship investment programme, to support the research and development efforts in new satellite technology.

The venture debt loan will complement equity from investors and financing from banks for the megafactory, allowing Aerospacelab to scale up its manufacturing capabilities while continuing its heavy investment in R&D, all without diluting the ownership of its founders.

The EIB funds will enable Aerospacelab to further develop its portfolio of satellite platforms and payloads, extending its applications to telecommunications and earth observation operations.

Aerospacelab's ambitions extend beyond commercial success. The company is one of two finalists competing to build the LEO (low-earth orbit) layer of IRIS², the European Commission's flagship constellation for secure communications and data transfers – competing directly against aerospace giant Airbus. A decision on the winner of the contract is expected in 2026.

"Already being in the final is pretty exciting for a relatively small company like us," says Deper.

For Europe, supporting companies like Aerospacelab represents more than economic opportunity. It's about strategic autonomy in space technologies, reducing dependence on non-European providers, and ensuring the continent can compete in the rapidly evolving "new space" economy.

As Deper puts it: "Going from the first satellite to ten satellites took us three years. I would expect that going from satellite number 11 to 1 000 will also take us about three years."

If he's right, Europe's space sector may never be the same.

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• Read more about EIB support for innovative European space companies like laser communications specialist Cailabs and nanosatellite maker Endurosat.

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