Welcome to SpaceTech Ireland - a fast, Ireland-focused read on the space economy.

This week: Ireland has five university teams building liquid rocket engines and about three companies that could hire the students doing it. This week we talk to Jay Looney, one of a new breed of Irish rocket men and women, about what happens to that generation next. Also: Réaltra's cameras head to deep space, Newry gets the island's biggest space test chamber, and €300m in Italian aerospace lending that Irish SMEs should be watching.

Ireland now has more students building liquid rocket engines than it has companies that could hire them to do it for a living. Five university teams, with several hundred students between them, are doing propulsion engineering that barely existed here five years ago. The industry meant to take them in when they graduate is still small, just a handful of pure-space companies by most counts.

Earlier this month, a student team at the University of Limerick tested Ireland's first 3D-printed liquid rocket engine, built almost entirely from scratch in eight months. On the last test, they pushed it deliberately past its limits, just to see what would happen. It held. The team, ULAS HiPR, went on to win Best Newcomer at Race2Space 2026, billed as the world's largest student rocket firing competition, beating teams with years more experience and much bigger budgets.

Jay Looney, who leads the team, says the engine was never really the point. He's 23, studying product design rather than engineering, and one of a new breed of Irish rocket men and women who have mostly taught themselves as they've gone along.

“The whole point isn't the rocket or the engine,” he told SpaceTech Ireland. “It's to develop enough stuff to a high enough standard that the people who need to see it finally do see it, and realise that it needs to be supported properly.” Asked what's holding the industry back, he's careful not to point fingers.

“I don't accuse anybody,” he said. “I think the entire thing is too small-minded — in energy and in anything, but especially space. I just don't think people can see that it is possible, that we're an extremely rich country, we are capable of doing this. And if it takes students to do it for you, to show you that it is needed, then we'll do that.”

The engine itself shows what's possible when the right people find each other. Its chamber was 3D-printed in metal at Irish Manufacturing Research's lab in Mullingar, then machined and put together by UL's own technicians. It happened largely by chance - as the European Space Agency's Phi-Lab Ireland, hosted by IMR, was getting off the ground, a shared contact put Looney's team in touch with Rob Conway-Kenny, who runs the programme.

“This is a great thing to support, as we start ramping up manufacturing in Ireland for space hardware,” Looney remembers being told, “because even the Phi-Lab in Ireland literally focuses on advanced manufacturing.” He's quick to credit the support the team has had along the way, from IMR to Enterprise Ireland, which he calls “always very good.”

The team's own progress shows how much Ireland still leans on other countries for now. Looney says the engine came together so quickly because they built on three years of open-source research from UK student teams who started before them. “We've taken their three years of experience, which is all open source, and we've managed to compress all of that learning into eight months,” he said.

There's still nowhere in Ireland to test what these students build, so HiPR and four other university teams share a single test day a year in the UK.

“Hopefully one day we transition from Enterprise Ireland being the de facto space agency to having an actual space agency to help these efforts. Instead of us just leeching off the UK,” he said.

What these students are training for mostly doesn't exist here yet, though Looney is at pains to point out he isn’t complaining. He can name three companies in the country doing genuine space work - Réaltra, Suas, and Mbryonics - and speaks of each with respect.

“It's kind of disappointing there's only a handful, but it's also never been a better time to be a space student, because there's so much happening that hadn't happened before,” he said.

He understands why some graduates choose to go abroad first. “If you're a student and you're looking at that, you're like, I could do that, or I could go work for a European defence company and test solid rocket motors up in the Alps. I wouldn't blame anybody for choosing going up to the Alps rather than staying here working on small satellite components.”

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But Looney doesn't think that's the end of the story. He plans to stay in Ireland himself, and expects many of his generation to follow the same path even if they leave for a while first.

“Some people might spend a year or two in Europe getting experience, but they're coming back. They're starting companies. It's my plan anyway. I know it's the head of UCC's (rocketry team) plan. It's a lot of people's plan,” he said.

“You're going to see a huge influx in even the next two years of space startups in Ireland coming from these university rocketry teams, which is really, really exciting.” For founders trying to hire propulsion or systems engineers in Ireland today, that's the labour market they're up against - not so much other Irish companies, but the pull of the wider European aerospace industry, at least for now.

Asked how the team feels about defence and dual-use applications of what they're building, Looney accepts there’s no neat answer. Much of the money behind propulsion research in Europe traces back to defence spending one way or another, whether or not any single project ever touches a weapons programme.

“A lot of the time it is kind of trickled down from defence - defence, where the money is, in Europe especially, because of the Ukraine war, because of the drone technology. And then we can use the money to do more noble things with it. I don't want to work in defence. Very few people I know in my society want to work in defence.”

Even so, he added: “I think you are shooting yourself in the foot as a country if you don't allow private companies to contribute to a growing economy of war. Because that is where the technology develops, that is where you get actual funding... it's such an awful subject, it's such a difficult subject.”

There's a practical answer taking shape too. Through EirSEDS, a student space group Looney co-founded, HiPR is now working with Ireland's other university teams to build a test stand of their own - small, mounted on a trailer, the same way American college teams have done it for years. The idea came out of a scare at Race2Space, where a faulty O-ring on another team's engine sprayed fuel across the shared test stand and nearly destroyed it. That team lost an entire year's work over one part without being able to re-test.

A proper facility like the one at Race2Space would cost hundreds of thousands of euro to build, Looney says, and the collaborating student teams currently have around €10,000 between them. Looney wants Irish industry to help close that gap. “We've had very generous sponsorship, but it's not enough to be developing critical aerospace infrastructure for the country. And it shouldn't really be on the students.”

Nobody set out to build any of this. There's no space agency behind it yet, no dedicated company, no proper test site. Students built what they needed out of pooled funds and borrowed know-how, because they believed it was worth doing regardless. The industry they're training for is still young in Ireland, but growing, and Looney and his generation of rocket engineers seem in no doubt it's coming.

Dublin-based Réaltra's VIKI video telemetry system is set to feature on two Ariane 6 flights after ESA confirmed this week that Henon, its first stand-alone deep-space CubeSat, has signed a launch services contract to fly alongside the PLATO exoplanet mission in late 2026.

Henon will be the first CubeSat to independently manoeuvre and communicate from deep space without a parent spacecraft, testing technology aimed at giving three to six hours' advance warning of solar storms.

“This is a new class of spacecraft,” said Roger Walker, Head of CubeSat missions at ESA.

“If you think about it, it’s a spacecraft roughly the size of a mini fridge heading out into deep space on its own. Not a large mission like Rosetta or BepiColombo but a tiny explorer proving what future low-cost interplanetary missions will be capable of.”

Resonate Testing, marking its 10th anniversary, has commissioned the largest and most capable thermal vacuum (TVAC) chamber on the island of Ireland at its Newry facility, with support from Invest Northern Ireland. Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins cut the ribbon alongside founders Tom and Donna Mallon.

The chamber replicates the vacuum and temperature extremes of orbit, letting companies qualify satellites and spacecraft hardware for launch and on-orbit operation without leaving the island.

Every Irish flight-hardware company - Mbryonics terminals, InnaLabs gyros, Réaltra avionics, Varadis sensors, Setanta Space compute boards - currently budgets time and freight costs to send hardware to the UK or continental Europe for testing. It is also a genuinely all-island story: a Northern Irish firm backed by Invest NI solving a problem for the whole Irish space supply chain, north and south.

🚀 Space Industry Skillnet is running a new short course, Doing Business with ESA, covering the Agency's procurement process, the esa-star tendering system, and how to build winning proposals for the space market. Taught by UCD's Dr Ronan Wall. Details here.

🚀 ESA says it currently has around 50 vacancies open, spanning engineering, communications, finance, HR, legal, procurement, and IT, with more roles expected over the coming weeks. The Agency is urging applicants to tailor each application individually rather than reuse a template CV. Browse current openings.

Intesa Sanpaolo / EIB / ESA (Italy) - lending facility - around €300m (8 July).

Italy's largest bank has signed Europe's first agreement of its kind with the European Investment Bank and ESA, opening a €300 million lending facility for small and medium-sized companies across Italy's aerospace supply chain. The EIB guarantees half the risk, which lets the bank lend to smaller suppliers it might otherwise consider too risky. Irish space SMEs face the same problem of being too small for conventional aerospace financing, and this is the first structure in Europe built specifically to solve it.

SWISSto12 (Switzerland) - Series C - €61m (~$70m).

Scaling manufacturing and integration capacity for its 3D-printed RF payloads and HummingSat small GEO satellites amid demand from sovereign and commercial customers; 2025 revenue €121m, contract book >€432m. It shows that European mid-size space hardware firms can now raise growth rounds on commercial traction rather than promises.

One trip, and your team stops guessing on AI adoption, platform, security, and tooling. 

WeAreDevelopers World Congress — San José, CA, September 23–25, 2026, in the heart of Silicon Valley. 500+ speakers and 10,000+ developers working through what actually ships in production: coding agents, evals, MCP, observability, agent security.

Kelsey Hightower. Thomas Dohmke (fmr. CEO, GitHub). Christine Yen (CEO, Honeycomb). Mathias Biilmann (CEO, Netlify). Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog). The people actually building the tools you use every day — all on one stage.

Bring a shortlist of decisions; leave with answers and contacts you can still reach after the event. Prices rise as we get closer. 

Use code GITPUSH26 for 10% off.

Get Your Pass

ESA Future PNT ITT - closes 7 August

ESA's Future Navigation department has issued an Invitation to Tender for in-orbit demonstrators in next-generation positioning, navigation and timing. The call has two technical priorities: quantum sensor technologies (using the quantum properties of atoms to measure position and time with far greater precision than current satellite systems) and machine learning for automation of navigation systems. Open to companies from ESA member states, Ireland included.

Deadline: 7 August 2026. → navisp.esa.int

PICTURE: SpaceX is due to launch the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket today. Starship Flight 13 - standing nearly 121 metres or 400 feet tall, will launch from Boca Chica in Texas with the Super Heavy Booster performing a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. The Starship upper stage will continue into space, deploy 20 next-generation V3 Starlink satellites for the first time, conduct heat-shield experiments, and target a splashdown in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia roughly 65 minutes after launch.

Next week: more funding, contracts, and careers in Ireland's space economy - delivered weekly.

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