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

This week: Ireland landed a lead role in an €18m EU quantum-secure communications network this week, with the Walton Institute heading the national effort and Mbryonics as industry partner. Also: Europe's annual space stocktake widened at EU Space Days, with growth tilting to services over hardware, and the University of Limerick moved nearer to firing the Republic's first 3D-printed liquid rocket engine.

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The EU's annual space industry stocktake now covers four areas instead of two, and points to a decade of growth driven by applications rather than hardware.

Every year the EU's space agency publishes a stocktake of the European space industry: what it earns now, where it's growing, and which sectors are using satellite data. This year's edition, the EU Space Market Report 2026, came out at EU Space Days in Nicosia and is broader than before. Earlier reports covered just two areas - satellite navigation and Earth observation. This one adds secure satellite communications and space situational awareness, the tracking of objects in orbit. The Irish Space Association flagged it to members this week.

EUSPA, the agency behind the report, breaks the market into 16 sectors, from farming and aviation to maritime and, new this year, border and internal security.

The numbers at a glance

Where the value is

Satellite navigation - used for everything from phone maps to delivery apps - is the giant. Most of its value comes not from selling chips and receivers, but from the services built on top of them: navigation apps, ride-hailing, fleet tracking.

Earth observation is smaller and moving the same way. The strongest growth is not in the raw satellite images but in what's made from them - tools like crop monitoring for farmers or flood mapping for insurers.

Europe's strong hand

On the supply side - the companies actually providing Earth observation data and services - Europe and the US together account for 83% of the global market, with Europe at 42% and the US at 41%. In this part of the market at least, Europe is not playing catch-up.

For Irish firms working in satellite data analysis, secure connectivity, drones, agri-tech and grid monitoring, the report is a useful read of where European demand is heading.

Download: EU Space Market Report 2026 — euspa.europa.eu/market-report

Ireland has secured a lead role in TransEuroOGS, a new €18m EU project to build a network of eight optical ground stations for satellite-based quantum-secure communication across Germany, Greece, Ireland and Luxembourg. The Walton Institute at South East Technological University (SETU) leads the Irish national ecosystem, with Galway optical communications company Mbryonics as industry partner.

The project formally kicked off with a consortium meeting in Berlin and Jena on 29–30 April, with public announcements following on 21 May. Co-funded by the EU's Connecting Europe Facility and national governments, TransEuroOGS is part of EuroQCI, the EU-wide quantum communications infrastructure programme.

The ground stations will be used to talk to EAGLE-1, Europe's first satellite built to test quantum key distribution from space. Led by Luxembourg operator SES with the European Space Agency and around 20 partners, it is due to launch on a Vega C rocket later this year for a three-year demonstration.

There’s been no announcement of where an Irish ground station for this project would be located.

With the Walton Institute leading a national ecosystem on a major EU quantum project, Ireland will have a say in Europe’s quest for quantum sovereignty.

Mbryonics' inclusion as the Irish industry partner extends its run of high-profile European programme wins, following the €18.6m HydRON Element 3 contract announced in April.

It caps a busy month for Walton. The Waterford institute is now active on both sides of Europe's quantum push: the infrastructure side, through TransEuroOGS and the ground stations it is helping build, and the skills side, through the separate European Quantum Academy, a €19.8m project to train Europe's quantum workforce that Walton joined this month.

ULAS HiPR, the University of Limerick's student rocketry team, has finished the additive manufacturing phase of Lúin of Celtchar - the first 3D-printed liquid rocket engine built in the Republic - and is moving to in-house machining of the injector assembly at UL's Faculty of Science and Engineering. A test firing is planned for July at the UK's Race2Space 2026 competition.

The engine is a 2 kN, water-cooled bi-propellant system burning isopropyl alcohol and nitrous oxide, designed entirely by the student team. Metal printing was carried out at Irish Manufacturing Research's Advanced Manufacturing Lab in Mullingar; precision machining and final assembly are now happening on campus in Limerick.

Race2Space, run in the UK, is one of the main student propulsion competitions in Europe. ULAS HiPR's acceptance - announced in March - was the team's first entry.

The 2025/2026 cohort runs to more than 100 students across aeronautical, mechanical, software and design engineering, and has previously competed at EuRoC and Mach-24.

Virgin Galactic flew its VSS Unity spaceplane on 27 May, returning the vehicle to glide flights above Spaceport America in New Mexico for the first time in nearly two years. The flight was not a return to passenger service but part of a pilot-training and operations-readiness programme ahead of the company's next-generation Delta spaceplane. Unity's final commercial flight, Galactic 07, was in June 2024.

It’s significant for Ireland because Dr Norah Patten, the Mayo aeronautical engineer set to become the first Irish person in space, is booked to fly on Virgin Galactic's Delta-class vehicle. She will take part in an all-women research mission for the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences alongside Kellie Gerardi of the United States and Canada's Dr Shawna Pandya.

Virgin Galactic said in May that it expected glide tests of the first new spaceplane in the third quarter of 2026, rocket-powered test flights in the fourth quarter, and commercial spaceflight operations to begin in the fourth quarter.

Patten's IIAS-02 mission is anticipated within the first year of Delta commercial service. On the company's current timetable, that puts her flight no earlier than late 2026 and, more realistically, sometime in 2027.

The schedule still depends on test flights that have not yet happened, and Virgin Galactic has slipped earlier targets before. For now, the company says the Delta programme remains on track.

ESA Academy wants to work more closely with university student groups active in space and related fields. A new scheme lets selected societies share ESA Academy opportunities — training, hands-on projects, conference sponsorships — with their members, and gives them visibility on ESA's own channels in return.

Each agreement is shaped to the size of the society. ESA sets up an onboarding call, both sides agree what the society will do, and the group files a short report at the end.

Worth a look for space, aerospace or engineering societies at UCD, Trinity, UL, Maynooth, NUI Galway, DCU and others. Best raised with committees now, before the autumn term gets going.

Deadline: 5 October 2026, 23:59 CEST. Apply: esa.int/Education/Engagement/ESA_Academy_Student_Associations_Outreach_Initiative

🚀 Base camp. NASA put nearly $1bn on the table this week for its first lunar base missions, picking Blue Origin to land two crew rovers - built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost - near the Moon's south pole, with Firefly Aerospace carrying a set of survey drones. The agency says the eventual base will sprawl across "hundreds of square miles."

Venture capital money into Irish tech firms dropped sharply in the first three months of the year. Irish technology SMEs raised €221.7m in the first quarter of 2026, down 58% on the same period a year earlier, according to the Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA), the body that represents the country's venture capital funds and investors. The report pointed out that the fall is measured against a record first quarter in 2025, when Irish firms raised more than half a billion euro.

ESA opens tender for AI-driven satellite navigation payloads

ESA Navigation has opened an Invitation to Tender for digital payload technologies using AI for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT). The study will look at reconfigurable, software-defined payloads that can adapt to changing conditions in orbit - the building blocks for a future in-orbit demonstrator later this decade.

Open to companies in ESA Member States subscribed to FutureNAV Component 3, which includes Ireland. Tenderers must register with esa-star to access the documents.

Closing date: 9 July 2026 Link: esa-star tender portal

Still live from recent editions

The Horizon Europe Space Research Call 2026 (€90.97m, deadline 3 September) remains open across eight topics. The European Defence Fund 2026 work programme is live with deadlines in two tranches across April and September. ESA's Business Applications Kick-start Open Call closes 29 May. The BASS Wildfires call closes 9 June.

PICTURE: SpaceX’s giant V3 Starship splashes down in the Indian Ocean after its 12th test flight, viewed from Starlink-equipped buoys providing real-time video streaming. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered SpaceX to complete an investigation into the latest Starship test flight before allowing the vehicle to fly again.

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

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