Welcome to SpaceTech Ireland — your fast, Irish-first read on the space economy. This week: Tracking Russia’s shadow fleet gets an Irish solution, UCD’s AI2Peat wins funding for bog satellites, an Astronaut hits the road for Space Week and a week of contrasts for two global startup stars.

October 3, 2025

When the French navy boarded a suspected ghost-fleet tanker off its coast this week — a vessel linked to mysterious drone incursions over Denmark—it underscored a problem that extends far beyond French territorial waters. T

The oceans have become contested space, and most coastal nations, including our own, are operating with significant blind spots.

Ireland's challenge is particularly acute. The Irish Exclusive Economic Zone covers an area six times the size of the country's landmass. Monitoring that with one or two patrol ships is close to impossible.

The stakes are high, with undersea internet cables carrying the bulk of transatlantic data traffic. Gas pipelines snake across the seabed. A planned offshore wind buildout could eventually generate a significant supply of Europe’s electricity.

All of it is vulnerable infrastructure, increasingly under surveillance from what Irish officials diplomatically term "research vessels."

What they are and how they operate: The “Shadow Fleet” (New York Times Investigation) - more than 1,300 Russian-linked vessels and hundreds of Chinese ships, many operating with sophisticated submersibles and transponders that can be switched off at will.

All illegal fishing which is a rampant problem in Irish waters as well as being a $10 billion global problem, drug trafficking worth $500 billion annually with detection rates below 10 per cent, plus oil smuggling, human trafficking, and environmental crimes.

Fintan Buckley, CEO of Dublin-based Ubotica, told RTÉ there's "real demand" for space-based AI to protect critical maritime infrastructure.

Ubotica builds AI processing systems that sit onboard satellites, analysing maritime activity in real time rather than transmitting raw data back to ground stations for processing. The technology has made the company a standard bearer for Irish space tech. It can identify ships going dark, flag unusual movement patterns, and detect vessels loitering near pipelines or cables.

Why it matters: The market opportunity extends beyond Irish waters. European governments are accelerating spending on maritime domain awareness as critical infrastructure becomes a security priority.

Ubotica and similar companies are well positioned to take advantage of two trends in procurement: increased satellite surveillance budgets and demand for AI that can process the resulting flood of data.

Wildly contrasting fortunes for two stars of the Space Startup sphere this week.

Starting with Italian company Avio, in which Italian defence company Leonardo has a stake. It’s shares jumped more than 8% on Monday, and rose again on Tuesday, after the company - which makes launch vehicles - signed a 40 million euro contract with the European Space Agency aimed at developing a reusable upper stage, technology in which Europe trails far behind SpaceX.

What’s a “reusable upper stage”? It’s the part of a rocket that takes a payload from low to its final orbit. Making it reusable could cut costs dramatically and finally bring Europe to SpaceX level.

Why it matters: Reusable upper stages are among the hardest problems in launch economics, and the most valuable. ESA backing signals political will (and budget) for Europe’s next phase of launcher tech.

Firefly Aerospace shares plunged as much as 25% after a core segment of one of the company’s Alpha rockets exploded on a test stand.

Firefly is best known for its Blue Ghost robot lander, which successfully landed on the Moon in March but the company is also trying to develop it’s Alpha rocket.

Last week’s explosion is the second major setback for Alpha.

In April, it lost its upper stage and payload for Lockheed Martin soon after liftoff from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California. The upper stage and payload reached 320 km altitude before crashing into the Pacific.

The bang: During the test at its facility in Briggs, Texas, “the first stage of Firefly’s Alpha Flight 7 rocket experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage,” the company said Monday in a statement on X.

Ireland's peatlands are getting the AI treatment. As Space Week approached, UCD announced that its AI2Peat platform had won National Challenge Fund backing for work that combines satellite imagery with machine learning to map the condition of the country's raised bogs.

The approach is straightforward: take Earth observation data, layer in information from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and use AI models to generate ecological maps showing which peatlands need restoration.

The result is a important decision support tool for managing one of Ireland's most significant carbon stores.

It’s a snappy mix of climate service and space tech. Peatland restoration is a key part of Ireland's climate commitments, and monitoring at scale has historically been expensive and labour-intensive. Satellites change that equation.

The AI2Peat success points to a pattern emerging in Ireland's space-adjacent ecosystem: a growing focus on downstream applications rather than upstream hardware, with climate services becoming an increasingly active area.

Space Week opens across the country on Saturday with the theme Living in Space—and former NASA astronaut Dan Tani will be spending much of it on the road.

From 4 to 7 October, Tani is doing a circuit of public talks and school visits across Cork, Kerry and Limerick, joined by Dr Niall Smith, Head of Research at MTU and director of Blackrock Castle Observatory.

Tani has vast experience when it comes to living in space.

On his second spaceflight he served as Flight Engineer for Expedition 16, spending 120 days aboard the International Space Station between October 2007 and February 2008.

During that mission he clocked nearly 35 hours across five spacewalks and operated the station's robotic arm to install Node-2, part of the ISS expansion that added docking ports and living space.

Space Week has become an anchor point in Ireland's space calendar—useful for networking and collaborations across the sector. With Ireland's space-adjacent ecosystem expanding, particularly in Earth observation and downstream applications, the week offers a natural rallying point for outreach and industry engagement.

Tani's connection to Ireland runs deeper than the speaking circuit. He's married to a Cork woman, which perhaps explains why he keeps coming back.

That’s if for this week.

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