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

This week: Lios, the Dublin acoustics firm behind SoundBounce, was named Innovator of the Year at Birmingham's Advanced Materials Show - another sign materials science has a place in Ireland's space sector alongside satellites and optical terminals. Two other homegrown stories back that up: a UCD-built experiment flew to microgravity in May in pursuit of dissolvable bone implants, and Dublin's EFJ Engineering has started producing parts for CERN within months of Ireland's associate membership taking effect. Further afield, Poland's €656m bet on the IRIS² constellation, plus funding deadlines and this week's Who's Hiring.

Lios, the Dublin deep-tech company behind the SoundBounce acoustic material, was named Innovator of the Year at the Advanced Materials Show in Birmingham this month, with co-founder Eimear O'Carroll pitching on the show's Scale-Up Accelerator stage.

Founders Rhona Togher and O'Carroll started the company in 2009 working on hearing protection before moving into advanced materials. SoundBounce is an acoustic metamaterial that dampens low-frequency noise - the kind produced by engines and airflow - while being thinner and lighter than conventional insulation, with applications across automotive, aerospace, construction and home appliances.

Why it matters for Irish companies: In May, Lios renewed its ESA contract for a second time - a deal worth close to €2 million under the Future Launchers Preparatory Programme - qualifying SoundBounce as fairing acoustic protection: the material that shields satellites from the intense noise and vibration of launch, which can damage payloads before they ever reach orbit.

Reducing that risk lets satellites be built lighter. Lios separately secured a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant in 2025. Seventeen years in, the company has done all of this from Ireland without relocating.

A Dublin precision engineering firm has begun producing components for CERN, less than nine months after Ireland gained the access that made the contract possible.

EFJ, a precision engineering company based in Clonshaugh, met CERN delegates at a Manufacturing Solutions Ireland event in June - organised by the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) and the UK-based Gauge and Tool Makers Association (GTMA). EFJ began producing precision components for CERN, with parts delivered to CERN's site in Switzerland within one month of that first meeting.

"We were delighted to meet delegates from CERN at Manufacturing Solutions Ireland, and subsequently to produce precision components for such a prestigious research organisation. Without the excellent work of the GTMA and TUS in bringing us together, this opportunity simply wouldn't have happened,” EFJ said in a statement.

CERN pointed out that the June meeting gave it the opportunity to meet with a wide range of suppliers at Manufacturing Solutions Ireland, a market that had previously been largely untapped by CERN prior to the associate membership.

“These face-to-face meetings allowed for acceleration in the manufacturing process, resulting in parts being delivered to our site in Switzerland just one month after our initial engagements."

Why it matters for Irish companies: Ireland became a CERN associate member in October last year, ending a status that had left Irish firms locked out of CERN's supplier base entirely.

“Until now, high-tech companies in Ireland were at a disadvantage in competing for contracts associated with the development of such technologies at CERN,” Dr Cormac O'Raifeartaigh, senior lecturer in physics at South East Technological University, wrote in the Irish Times in March.

EFJ has 20 years of ISO 9001-certified precision manufacturing across medical device, semiconductor and aerospace work.

Wider context: CERN's institutional pull goes well beyond one contract. CERN's particle accelerators, most famously the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the Higgs boson in 2012, are at the cutting edge of fundamental physics, and its engineering demands have also driven real advances in microelectronics and medical imaging. A UCD School of Physics group already has a long-standing role in one of the LHC's matter-antimatter experiments.

O'Raifeartaigh pointed out that Ireland's associate membership only pays off if it's matched by national research funding, which he notes is currently thin for fundamental physics.

A UCD experiment that flew on a Swedish suborbital rocket at the end of May could help develop a new generation of medical implants that dissolve inside the body. The XRMON Mg-μg module, built at UCD, studied how magnesium alloys turn from liquid to solid in microgravity. Gravity affects how metals solidify, which shapes their strength, so isolating that effect means running the same test on the ground and in space and comparing.

It's the first time these experiments have been run on magnesium alloys. The ESA-funded work, led by Professor David Browne, was one of 12 experiments from nine countries on the SubOrbital Express-5 mission, which launched from Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden on 31 May and reached 260km altitude for just over six minutes of microgravity.

Why it matters for Irish companies: Magnesium is about half the weight of titanium, with density and strength close to natural bone, and dissolves safely in the body over time - a candidate for temporary implants such as bone screws, plates and stents that currently require a second surgery for removal.

For a country with no launch programme of its own, suborbital flights like SubOrbital Express-5 remain the practical route to microgravity research for Irish universities, and this is a concrete example of that route producing work with a commercial path rather than a one-off experiment.

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Code 2FOR1 gets you two WeAreDevelopers World Congress passes for the price of one — so don't make the trip to Silicon Valley solo.

San José, CA · September 23–25, 2026. 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers, 20+ stages, and the full software development lifecycle in one place.

On stage: Kelsey Hightower, Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO), Christine Yen (Honeycomb), Olivier Pomel (Datadog) — the people building the tools you use every day. Three days of AI, agents, cloud, security, and architecture, plus workshops, live coding, and the official Congress party.

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🚀 Rocket Factory Augsburg has stood its RFA ONE rocket on the launch pad at SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland for the first time, moving the German-Austrian company closer to a maiden orbital flight targeted for this summer. If successful, RFA ONE would be the first vertical orbital rocket to fly from UK soil.

🚀 Poland bets €656m on IRIS²: Poland signed an agreement in Warsaw on 21 July committing €656m ($748m) to the EU's IRIS² constellation - funding six MEO and six LEO satellites as a Polish national system, plus a Warsaw gateway. IRIS² runs on optical inter-satellite links, the market Galway's Mbryonics is scaling up to serve.

🚀 NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev undock from the ISS on Sunday 26 July, aboard Soyuz MS-28, for a parachute landing on the Kazakh steppe roughly three and a half hours later. They will have spent 241 days in space. Left aboard is NASA commander Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Andrey Fedyaev, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and the newly arrived (July 14) trio of Anil Menon, Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.

ESA Phi-Lab Ireland Open Call 2026 - Irish Manufacturing Research's ESA Phi-Lab (Mullingar) offers ESA innovation seed funding up to €400,000 for projects under two years, plus mentorship and research infrastructure access. Applications due 8 September 2026. (Irish Manufacturing Research / DevelopmentAid listing)

Horizon Europe EU Space Research Call 2026 (HORIZON-CL4-2026-SPACE-03) — €90.97m total budget, managed by HaDEA. Deadline 3 September 2026, 17:00 Brussels time. (Call details)

ESA BASS (Business Applications and Space Solutions) — rolling open calls (Kick-Starts up to €75k at 75% funding; proof-of-concept/pilot projects up to €600k). Ireland subscribes via ESA Space Solutions Centre Ireland. No new thematic call this week — apply anytime via business.esa.int/funding.

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

ESA Business Incubation Centre Noordwijk: Ignition pre-incubation programme
Applications are open for ESA BIC Noordwijk's next Ignition cohort, aimed at early-stage space business ideas moving into market validation. Deadline: 6 August. Details at sbicnoordwijk.nl/ignition.

PICTURE: Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, 20 July 1969. Photographed by Neil Armstrong, who appears only as a reflection in Aldrin's gold visor - the only other person on the Moon at that moment, standing just out of frame. This week marks 57 years since Apollo 11 put the first humans on the lunar surface. In all the time since, only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon - all of them across Apollo's six landing missions, 11 through 17, flown between 1969 and 1972. Nobody has added to that number in over five decades.

NASA's current plan is to change that with Artemis IV, targeting early 2028: four astronauts will travel to lunar orbit, where Orion will dock with a commercial lander from SpaceX or Blue Origin. Two of the crew will descend to the Moon's South Pole - a region no human has ever explored - for roughly a week of surface science before heading home.

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

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