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

This week: A Dublin start-up is looking for €3 million to put artificial intelligence on satellites, and Irish companies have five days left to ask ESA for up to €400,000. Also this week: a UCD graduate is running the science on NASA's newest telescope, plus 20-odd engineering jobs in Galway and Cork, and an ESA traineeship that will take a policy graduate as readily as an engineer.

Setanta Space, the Dublin company building onboard computing and AI for spacecraft, is seeking to raise €3 million to accelerate development of its autonomy technologies.

The company has also been accepted onto ESA BIC Ireland, the two-year incubation programme run through the ESA Space Solutions Centre at Tyndall, which carries up to €50,000 in seed funding on joining, along with technical support and access to the European supply chain.

Setanta was founded in 2025 and launched publicly at NovaUCD in February. Last month it demonstrated its hardware at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, the largest annual gathering in the small satellite business, to operators, payload developers and potential partners.

Its key product is the Danu board, a modular onboard computer that the company says allows satellites to process sensor data, detect anomalies and make operational decisions in orbit rather than waiting for instructions from a ground station. It is built around an FPGA, a chip that can be reconfigured after manufacture, so that one board can serve missions with very different processing demands. Danu passed its final review for prototype manufacture in the spring.

Chief technology officer and co-founder James Murphy told SpaceTech Ireland the money is not in yet.

"To clarify, we haven't raised just yet, but we are actively building the round. We hope to have it closed in the next three to six months," he said.

"The round is to complete our development and get an in-orbit demonstrator for our DANU system."

The company has not put a valuation on the round or said who it is raising from.

He said being accepted into ESA BIC gives Setanta the opportunity to network with the wider European space supply chain and advance its technologies further and faster. The €50,000 that comes with the ESA BIC place is separate seed funding rather than part of the raise.

"Our goal is to give mission designers the flexibility to scale compute on demand, process Earth observation data directly at the payload and give satellites the operational autonomy needed to respond immediately in increasingly complex orbital environments," said Adam Taylor, an Essex-based FPGA specialist and the start-up's co-founder and CEO.

Murphy previously led AI engineering at Réaltra Space Systems Engineering and worked on the Réaltra–Ubotica ESA project on artificial intelligence for satellites. The other two founders are Jake O'Brien, lead engineer, and Tomas Chester, lead hardware design engineer. Between them the four have delivered flight systems for launch vehicles and deep-space missions, with backgrounds spanning spacecraft electronics, embedded systems, FPGA design and applied machine learning.

O'Brien is also one of Ireland's two national points of contact for the Space Generation Advisory Council, a role he took up this spring alongside Daire O'Sullivan. SGAC is a Vienna-based non-profit that represents students and space professionals aged 18 to 35 to the United Nations, space agencies and industry.

Roberto Del Prete joined as head of AI systems over the summer. He came from ESA's Phi-lab at Frascati, the agency's own artificial intelligence research group, where he had been a research fellow since 2023 working on onboard processing and maritime surveillance. He wrote phidown, an open-source tool for pulling Copernicus Earth observation data, and published several open datasets used for training vessel-detection models.

The ESA Phi-Lab Ireland Open Call 2026 closes at 12 noon on Tuesday 8 September. Applications go by email to [email protected] with the subject line "ESA Phi-Lab Ireland Open Call 2026".

The call offers ESA innovation seed funding of between €200,000 and €400,000 for projects running up to two years. The money is non-dilutive, meaning ESA takes no equity in return. Small and medium companies can have up to 80 per cent of allowable project costs covered; multinationals up to 50 per cent.

Successful applicants also get access to equipment and instrumentation at Irish Manufacturing Research and, new for this call, at the South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre at South East Technological University. https://www.esaphilab.ie/opencall

Lead Applicants must submit the required Application Documentation to [email protected] - support is available by contacting the ESA Phi-Lab Ireland Team at that address right up to the deadline.

The call is aimed at advanced materials and manufacturing for space hardware. The listed topics are advanced materials research, design optimisation, additive manufacturing, structural analysis and simulation, optimisation of production processes, and the integration of smart materials.

Phi-Lab Ireland is run by Irish Manufacturing Research in Mullingar as part of a six-year ESA programme. Mbryonics and Ubotica came through the first call in 2025.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday morning on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, at 12:26 Irish time. It is now on a three-month cruise to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometres out, where the James Webb telescope also orbits.

The mission's senior project scientist is Julie McEnery, who took her PhD in experimental physics at UCD in 1997, observing the galaxy Markarian 421. She spent a decade as project scientist on NASA's Fermi gamma-ray telescope before moving to Roman.

UCD awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2015 and named her alumna of the year in 2018, and its school of physics gives a medal in her name each year to the top student on its MSc in Space Science and Technology.

Roman has a 2.4-metre mirror and a wide field instrument that captures a far larger patch of sky in one go than Hubble can. Over five years it will survey for dark energy and dark matter and take a census of planets across the Milky Way. It also carries a coronagraph as a technology demonstration, an instrument that blocks out a star's light so that faint planets orbiting it become visible.

Ireland's €40 million Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund opens its eighth call on 1 October, with applications closing on 3 February, 2027. The fund backs consortia rather than single companies - small firms, multinationals and research bodies working together - and Enterprise Ireland is running 10 matchmaking events around the country before it opens. [email protected]

UCD is taking final applications for a short course on bidding for European Space Agency contracts, covering the tender documents, the proposal template, ESA's costing sheets and its rules on who owns the intellectual property. The fee is €1,000, or €700 with 30 per cent Skillnet funding. spaceindustryskillnet.com/project/winning-esa-proposals

SES has awarded OHB a contract worth close to €1 billion to build 18 satellite platforms for the medium Earth orbit segment of IRIS². Announced 31 August. OHB is the same German prime that leads the PLATO mission industrial team, on which Réaltra's parent company holds a €3.4 million contract for the telescope thermal control system.

HyImpulse has extended its Series A by €50 million. Announced 2 September. The German company is developing hybrid-propulsion launch vehicles and was not among the five shortlisted for ESA's European Launcher Challenge.

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2 October, 13:00 CEST - ESA Fly Your Satellite! Design Booster. University student teams with a CubeSat or PocketQube mission at preliminary design stage get ESA mentoring, training and access to test facilities. Minimum eight students for a CubeSat, four for a PocketQube, plus an institutional endorsement letter. [email protected]

Thu 3 Sept, 22:25 Irish Time: ISRO EOS-05 - GSLV Mk II - Satish Dhawan - India

The GSLV Mk II has not flown since July 2025, and this is only ISRO's second launch of the year following the failure of its PSLV rocket in January.

Fri 4 Sept, 21:00 Irish Time: Isar Aerospace - Spectrum - Andoya, Norway

Spectrum's scheduled second flight is its qualification flight and the first to carry payloads - five cubesats and one non-separable experiment flown under ESA's Boost! programme. The first flight, in March 2025, was lost about half a minute after lift-off. Isar holds a €197.8 million ESA launcher contract, the largest of the three signed so far.

PICTURE: An artist’s impression of MAGPIE, Europe’s first lunar surface exploration mission, on the Moon’s south pole. The European Space Agency and ispace-Europe signed the implementation agreement this week in Copenhagen. The rover is planned to reach the Moon in 2029, carried down on ispace’s Mission 4 lander. It is built for a short working life of about 10 Earth days, with a drill, radar and other instruments to look for ice and map the frozen polar soil. The aim is to find out whether the surface can support a lasting human presence.

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

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