Launcher Challenge, Iris², Roscosmos, cyber – the week in space from the perspective of those who look for the people behind it
Space update from FOCUS-DEFENCE, September 2026. This week space returned to the headlines with billions, threats and big words. We have sorted the news from the Space.Table briefing of 4 September and looked at it through the lens that occupies us every day: who are the people who are supposed to make this happen?
Access to space is “never guaranteed”
ESA has made it official: Isar Aerospace (197.8 million euros), Rocket Factory Augsburg (186.9 million) and PLD Space from Spain (158.9 million) have signed contracts under the European Launcher Challenge. The money flows against milestones, and the most important one is fixed: by the end of 2027 every competitor must demonstrate an orbital flight. None has managed it so far. Isar Aerospace has made several attempts from Andøya since January and aborted them, RFA had to postpone its summer launch from SaxaVord, and the British competitor Orbex has been insolvent since the start of the year. ESA’s head of strategy Lucia Linares puts it soberly: “Access to space is not easy and never guaranteed.”
Anyone who enjoys the sums for a moment should take a second look at the list. Three providers, three countries, one insolvency – that is not an industry, that is a starting grid. Isar Aerospace’s series production plant, according to founder Daniel Metzler the largest rocket factory in Europe, is already standing. What counts now is no longer capital but reliability: test campaigns, quality assurance, certification, operations. Those are different profiles from the founding phase. In our conversations with candidates from aerospace and defence technology we see that exactly these people – experienced programme managers, quality and safety leads, people who have built up a launch operation or taken a development programme into series production – are often still missing at New Space companies. ESA has released the money. The companies have to find the people themselves.
HyImpulse fits the picture: 50 million euros from a second Series A round, including Bayern Kapital, BW-Capital and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with an order backlog of more than 350 million euros. What CEO Christian Schmierer says about the suborbital SR75 is remarkable: it reaches Mach 5 and is suited as a test platform for hypersonic technologies – “we are talking about this with industrial partners as well as with defence ministries in European countries”. The line between civil spaceflight and defence is not disappearing slowly. It is gone.
Iris²: from six to 15.6 billion
OHB of Bremen receives an order from SES worth almost one billion euros for 18 MEO satellite platforms of the European security constellation Iris². First launches in 2029, first services in 2030. That is a success for Germany as a location. But it is also the story of a programme announced in 2022 at around six billion euros with operational readiness in 2027 – and now, according to Handelsblatt, at 15.6 billion euros; the Commission would neither confirm nor deny the figure. Whoever orders sovereignty in space in Europe gets it. Just not at the list price and not on the delivery date.
The Galaxy report by the industry association Eurospace supplies the explanation: 71 per cent of the European space industry’s revenue comes from institutional customers, each with its own rules, and procurement values compliance over performance. Eurospace president Marco Fuchs dispels a comfortable myth: the “big open market out there” that Europe supposedly keeps missing does not exist. The question is whether Europe is prepared to organise its own demand so that industry can invest. Five recommendations follow, among them a “space demand pact” and a European preference for strategic capabilities. The industry, it says explicitly, is not asking for subsidies but for demand. On 10 September Ursula von der Leyen will give her first keynote speech on space at the International Space Summit in Paris, with the announced “European Space Shield” in the background. It will be interesting to see whether she has read the report.
Russia opens the fence
On the other side something is happening that would have been considered unthinkable three years ago: Roscosmos is opening the sector to private companies. Director General Dmitry Bakanov says openly that his organisation used to fight those “standing behind the fence” – today the task is to involve them as fully as possible. The national project earmarks the equivalent of around 44 billion euros by 2036 for 1,118 communications and Earth-observation satellites; by 2030 half of production is to be usable for both civil and military purposes, drones expressly included. Private investors want to build a launch pad at Vostochny for six billion euros.
One should not overrate this. Russian venture investors themselves speak of a five-to-seven-year lag and a lack of risk capital, and Ukraine’s strike on the Progress centre in Samara has shown that Russian space manufacturing is a legitimate wartime target. But one should not underrate it either. An adversary that consistently aligns its space programme with dual use and mobilises private capital is a different adversary from yesterday’s state colossus.
The “pre-Stuxnet era”
The third strand is the quietest and perhaps the most important. Since the start of the war against Iran, the security provider Vantor has recorded a 400 per cent increase in cyberattacks on satellites and ground infrastructure, with hacktivists and state actors working in concert. The Viasat hack of February 2022, which cut off parts of the Ukrainian military and civilian users across Europe, was the blueprint. CISPA researcher Ali Abbasi considers military satellites comparatively well protected – older and civilian systems, by contrast, vulnerable and “easy to hack”. His conclusion: “I believe we are living in a pre-Stuxnet era.” The entry point is rarely the satellite itself but the ground station and the person in front of it: social engineering, a supposed superior who urgently needs frequencies and passwords. Anyone who has read our article on critical infrastructure this week will recognise the pattern. It is the same one.
And who leads all this?
The opinion piece by Torsten Kriening (SpaceWatch.Global) in the same briefing sums up what has occupied us as an executive search firm for years. The occasion is Trump’s executive order on a “U.S. Space Academy” – not yet an academy, only a commission, but with a statement that concerns Europe: human capital is strategic infrastructure. ESA puts the European space workforce at 66,100 people and expects 104,000 by 2030. At the same time, on 7 July a court in Strasbourg liquidated the International Space University, the first university of its kind, with 6,000 alumni in 110 countries.
Kriening’s key sentence deserves a frame: the shortage is not of engineers but of people who can translate between technology and administration – who can set up a European defence contract on a sound legal footing, steer a programme with security-classification requirements across several member states and then explain the result to a budget committee. Exactly these profiles are what we look for on behalf of our clients, and exactly these profiles are rare. They do not emerge from training weeks. They emerge from careers – in the Bundeswehr, in procurement agencies, at ESA and DLR, in programmes at Airbus, OHB or Thales, and increasingly at the New Space companies that are currently learning what series maturity means.
Money, Kriening writes, was never the bottleneck for European space talent; institutions were. We would add: and employers who understand that a programme manager with security-clearance experience and fluency in the language of the authorities is worth more to a space company today than the tenth propulsion engineer. The billions have been released. The question is who turns them into orbits.
If you are one of these people, or looking for them: talk to us. Personally, confidentially, with an eye for values and fit.
Talk to us. connect@focus-defence.de · +49 30 5444 5899
Sources
Space.Table (Table.Briefings), issue 41 of 4 September 2026 – contributions by Ralf Nestler, Gerhard Kowalski, Friedrich List and Torsten Kriening · ESA announcement on the European Launcher Challenge · Eurospace, “Galaxy” report · Handelsblatt on Iris² costs · Süddeutsche Zeitung, interview with Daniel Metzler