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This week: ESA placed a record €26.7m in contracts in Ireland last year, according to Enterprise Ireland’s new Space Activities in Ireland 2025 report. Plus, the case for an Irish research centre where crews would rehearse Moon and Mars missions, 16 companies head to Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Irish student rocket teams get a competition at home, with entries for next March’s Irish Intervarsity Rocketry Challenge closing on 13 November. OHB wins a €554m ESA contract for the next Sentinel-3, and the EU reopens its SAFE defence loans with Ireland weighing a bid. Mbryonics, Lios, Réaltra, Starlink and Ubotica are hiring, and ESA has opened more than 200 student internships.

Enterprise Ireland published its Space Activities in Ireland 2025 report on Thursday, showing that the European Space Agency placed a record €26.7 million in contracts in Ireland last year. Of that total, €25.3 million went to industry and €1.3 million to Irish universities and other research organisations. The figure is up from €24.56 million in 2024.

The number of Irish companies working with ESA rose to 126 by the end of 2025, including 15 that became space-active during the year. As SpaceTech Ireland reported in September, four further Irish companies won their first ESA contracts in the first half of 2026, by which point 130 firms were engaging with the agency.

ESA’s Irish business incubator had its strongest year to date, awarding 15 new incubation contracts. The report also recaps Ireland’s pledge of more than €170 million to ESA programmes through 2030, announced at last November’s ministerial meeting in Bremen.

Jenny Melia, chief executive of Enterprise Ireland, said 2025 was a year in which Irish companies “moved decisively from development into commercial delivery”.

Space Activities in Ireland 2025

An Irish engineer who until recently helped run Europe’s laboratory on the International Space Station wants Ireland to build a research centre where crews would live and work in conditions close to those on the Moon or Mars, including inside a vacuum chamber.

UCD graduate Cillian Murphy, who spent four years at the Columbus Control Centre near Munich (profiled in our 22 October issue), has also volunteered for years in analog research. This is the field that rehearses missions on Earth, using sealed habitats and remote sites to see how crews and equipment cope before anyone is sent.

“The analog research space is a relatively new and small part of the space sector that is rapidly growing right now,” he told SpaceTech Ireland. “For a long time, I’ve been kind of toying with the idea of building a dedicated analog research centre in Ireland.” He would draw on a network in the field that he described as “small but global already at this stage”.

The centre he has in mind would go further than existing European facilities. “I have visions of an actual vacuum environment. The same kind of thing that ESA has, or most of the agencies, they have huge vacuum chambers for testing hardware. I envision a vacuum chamber that can be carefully controlled and monitored for specific kinds of analog research.” Asked whether that meant with people inside, he said: “Exactly, including humans.”

Part of the reason few facilities do this, he said, is the risk. “But that level of risk is eventually a requirement because we’re asking people to be prepared to go into the vacuum of space, to go into extremely hostile environments. And part of making sure that they are prepared for that is to put them into hostile environments.”

He named NASA’s NEEMO programme as one of the best analog facilities so far. Its crews live for up to about three weeks in Aquarius, a laboratory 19 metres underwater off Key Largo in Florida.

Interest in the field has grown as space agencies plan longer stays on the Moon. In September 2024, ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) opened LUNA in Cologne. It is a hall with 700 square metres of simulated lunar surface, beside the European Astronaut Centre.

“A certain amount of things were learned in Apollo,” he said. “Apollo’s a long time ago. We’ve lost the capabilities that we had in those days and their objectives were very different then than what we have now. They were pretty much just happy to be there, do anything at all and come back.”

Murphy is a volunteer flight director with the Austrian Space Forum, a non-profit group that stages simulated Mars missions. Its simulations include the delay in messages to and from Mars, depending on where the two planets are.

“You have a 10-minute delay to send a message to Mars and 10 minutes more to get a message back,” he said. The forum is funded partly by the regional government of Tirol, with sponsors for individual missions. “It also puts pretty hard limits on what the ÖWF can afford to do,” he said. “That’s why I think there’s still room for us to do so, so much better.”

Because an indoor centre does not depend on climate or terrain, he argues it could be built anywhere. “It’s something that will then be location agnostic, and it’s something that Ireland can take a leadership position in, where we can build those facilities, where we can do high level, long duration, analog research under vacuum, under water, under any number of controlled conditions.”

“I’m describing one niche where I think Ireland can really actually capture leadership in the space sector.”

He has also lived in a habitat himself. In 2021 he was one of six crew on HECATE, a two-week isolation mission at the LunAres Research Station. LunAres was built in 2017 on a former military airfield at Piła in Poland. “We went through the processes of daily routines, exercise, managing limited resources, living in a small cramped shared environment.”

On who would need to move first to fund a centre in Ireland, he said: “It’s a little bit of wishful thinking considering what I’d hope to do myself someday, but I’d love to just see somebody propose a good enough idea that it can bring all of those bodies together.”

Without that, he said, the ideas leave. “It’s not for lack of thinking big enough, but the people are taking those ideas and they’re leaving Ireland because there isn’t the opportunities, there isn’t the companies, there isn’t the money in Ireland to make those ideas reality.”

He does not expect to come home to build it soon. “Someday. I don’t think that day is here yet for me.”

Student rocket teams from across the island will compete at home for the first time next spring. EirSEDS, the national student space organisation, and UCC’s Rocketry and Space Exploration Society (RSES) will run the Irish Intervarsity Rocketry Challenge (IIRC) from 26 to 29 March 2027. The venue has not yet been announced.

The organisers say the lack of domestic events has been one of the main obstacles for student rocketry in Ireland. Until now, teams that wanted to compete had to travel abroad, which most students cannot afford and which discourages new teams from forming. Places at the European Rocketry Challenge (EuRoC) in Portugal are competitive. UCC RSES was selected this year but withdrew, so no Irish team took part.

The IIRC will provide the launch infrastructure, and the launches will be run by Ulster Rocketry and Irish Rocketry. Funding comes from UCC Alumni and Friends, the university’s philanthropy programme supported by alumni, friends and staff.

Applications opened on 26 October and close on 13 November. The entry form and a system requirements document setting out the technical rules are on eirseds.ie. Spectator and event details will follow.

🚀 The Galway Science & Technology Festival holds its exhibition day this Sunday, 8 November (10am–5pm), at the University of Galway. Its space strand in the Human Biology Building includes live satellite tracking, space memorabilia from the Computer and Communications Museum, and a rocket workshop with real launches. Former NASA engineer David Bushman is a guest speaker, as is Jay Looney of the University of Limerick rocketry team (interviewed here in July), who will talk about how Irish students are designing and building rockets. https://galwayscience.ie/

🚀 Enterprise Ireland will take 16 companies to Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen from 17 to 19 November (Hall 7, booth Y35). It had six on its stand last year, Ireland’s first national presence at the show. The companies include Ubotica, whose AI runs on board satellites so images can be analysed in orbit; Réaltra, the Dublin maker of space electronics and cameras; ÉireComposites in Galway, which builds lightweight composite structures for aircraft and spacecraft; and Farran Technology in Cork, which makes millimetre-wave components for satellite instruments. The other 12 range from laser makers to an adhesives supplier. Resonate Testing, the Northern Ireland test house that checks hardware against vacuum, extreme temperatures, vibration and shock at one site, will also be exhibiting.

OHB wins €554m ESA contract for next Sentinel-3

OHB System of Bremen has won a €554m contract from ESA to build the Sentinel-3 Next Generation Topography satellite for Copernicus, the EU’s Earth-observation programme. The contract signed on 4 November includes an option for a second satellite. It will carry radar altimeters, which measure the height of the sea surface, ice and inland waters from orbit. OHB says it will give more precise sea-level data, wider coverage and more frequent passes than the current Sentinel-3 satellites. OHB will lead a group of European suppliers.

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SAFE defence loans, second round: €21.3bn
The Commission has reopened its SAFE (Security Action for Europe) loan scheme to all 27 member states, with €21.3bn on offer. That is what’s left of the original €150bn. The loans go to governments, and this time the money must be spent on joint procurement. The priorities are air and missile defence, drones and counter-drone systems, and ammunition. Ireland stayed out of the loans after then-minister for finance Paschal Donohoe vetoed a plan to borrow up to €100m, and the State is now considering a bid. Defence Minister Helen McEntee said in October she would like Ireland to take part.

Deadline: 13 November.

EDIP: key electronic components, €122.25m
Flagged by Defence Technology Cluster Ireland. The EU’s defence industry programme offers grants of up to €20m to companies that expand European production of defence electronics. Eligible items include RF and laser modules, multispectral cameras, avionics, printed circuit boards and IC substrates, plus chips such as FPGAs (programmable logic chips). Grants cover up to 35% of costs, or 50% if certain conditions are met. Companies in EU member states and Norway can apply.

Deadline: 16 February 2027.

PICTURE: France’s defence procurement agency (DGA) conducted the first operational flight of ArianeGroup’s SyLEx sounding rocket on November 4, carrying experimental payloads to support the development of the country’s next-generation ballistic missile. Dublin-based Réaltra’s GEKI satellite-navigation unit flew on the first test flight in November last year, which carried an ArianeGroup demonstration payload.

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

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