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

This week: ESA is opening its Hera asteroid probe to outside software developers once the science mission wraps up next year, and there is Irish hardware already flying on board. A student team from University College Cork has won one of 25 places at the European Rocketry Challenge in Portugal in October. We have five things worth knowing before next Wednesday's eclipse, which will cover about 96% of the sun over Cork. Plus a spent Falcon 9 stage that hit the Moon, Rocket Lab's $397m US Space Force award and what it means for Mbryonics, the latest funding deadlines, and this week's jobs.

ESA is inviting researchers, start-ups and individual developers to run their own software on board Hera, its asteroid-defence spacecraft, once the probe completes its scientific mission next year.

Ireland already has hardware flying on Hera. InnaLabs, the Blanchardstown-based sensor manufacturer, built the ARIETIS-NS gyroscope that took over as Hera separated from its Falcon 9 upper stage in October 2024, the first sensor Hera used after launch, and still serving as backup orientation reference.

Hera launched in October 2024 to study the aftermath of NASA's DART mission, which deliberately struck the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in 2022 to test whether a spacecraft impact could alter an asteroid's orbit.

Once Hera completes that work around mid-2027, it will take on a new role as a flying software laboratory, letting European innovators test next-generation approaches to onboard intelligence, image processing and AI-based autonomy directly on the spacecraft in flight, some 150 million kilometres from Earth.

The setup relies on Hera's onboard computer, a European-built dual-core LEON3 processor. One core will keep running the spacecraft itself, while the other hosts a sandboxed environment for guest software, according to Hera software engineer Jorge Lopez Trescastro. Guest experiments will run for two to three hours at a time and be shut down immediately if anything goes wrong.

ESA is casting a wide net: artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, gaming and simulation, and embedded systems all qualify, and applicants don't need a space industry background. Submissions go through ESA's Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP), the agency's standing channel for unsolicited ideas.

For Irish AI, robotics or vision developers, it's a rare route to flight heritage without having to build hardware.

A student team from University College Cork will compete at the European Rocketry Challenge in Portugal this October, its first appearance at the competition.

UCC's Rocketry and Space Exploration Society is one of 25 teams selected for the seventh edition of the event, which runs from 15 to 21 October. The challenge is organised by the Portuguese Space Agency with the Portuguese Army and Constancia town council, and is open to university teams from EU, EEA and ESA member states.

Teams design and build their own rockets, then launch them at the Santa Margarida military camp under the eye of a technical evaluation board.

Competition for places was tight. Sixty-four teams from 26 countries applied and 61 were eligible, up from 56 the previous year. The organisers set aside five places for first-time entrants this year, a new arrangement. UCC took one of them, alongside two Spanish teams.

The Cork society launched its first high-powered rocket, Prometheus, at the Mach-25 competition at Machrihanish airbase in Scotland last year, reaching 2,259 metres at 313 metres per second, close to the speed of sound. The airframe was cardboard reinforced with fibreglass, with 3D-printed parts and a small sensor payload carrying a camera. It was only the second rocket the society had built.

Marta Goncalves, who runs education and science programmes at the Portuguese Space Agency, said the standard of applications made selection difficult, and pointed to a shift among student teams towards building their own liquid and hybrid motors rather than buying commercial solid ones. Liquid and hybrid designs require the team to build their own plumbing, valves and injectors, and are considerably harder to get right.

UCC is not the only Irish student team pushing in that direction. ULAS HiPR at the University of Limerick, which has competed at EuRoC before, took Best Newcomer at the Race2Space propulsion competition in Buckinghamshire in July. Its engine, the Lúin of Celtchar, was 3D-printed in metal at Irish Manufacturing Research's lab in Mullingar and assembled at Limerick.

Enjoying SpaceTech Ireland? It's a free weekly brief on Ireland's space economy. Subscribe here - and forward this to a colleague who'd want it.

1. Totality is short, and it is elsewhere. The path crosses Greenland, Iceland, a small area of northeastern Portugal and Spain. Totality lasts a minute and 40 seconds across northern Spain. Ireland gets a deep partial, about 96% in Cork between 18:15 and 20:08.

2. The science target is the corona, with benefits for space weather. Researchers at KU Leuven are modelling what the corona will look like when the disc is blocked, then checking those predictions against the real thing to improve the models behind space weather forecasting.

3. Two ESA missions are observing. Solar Orbiter begins a dedicated observing run on 9 August, aimed at the centre of the Sun, with four instruments recording through the eclipse - ultraviolet cameras, a magnetic field mapper and an instrument that blocks the bright disc to expose the faint atmosphere around it. Proba-3, the formation-flying pair that generates its own artificial eclipses, will be in the wrong part of its orbit for the Earth-side event.

4. Ireland's contribution: MTU's Blackrock Castle Observatory is distributing 6,500 free glasses across Cork, the largest such distribution in the country, with ESERO Ireland coordinating events nationally. Birr Castle is running an evening with solar astrophysicist Jeremy Rigney. ESA's own broadcast comes from the Javalambre observatory in Teruel, with a public programme in Leon.

5. This is the first of three. A total eclipse crosses Spain on 2 August 2027, followed by an annular eclipse over Portugal and Spain on 26 January 2028.

🚀 A spent Falcon 9 upper stage struck the Moon on Wednesday morning near Einstein crater, on the western edge of the lunar disc as seen from Earth, at 07:35 Irish time. The stage had launched on 15 January 2025 carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lander under NASA's commercial delivery programme. Solar activity and gravity gradually bent its orbit until it was on a collision course. It hit at roughly 8,700 km/h.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile detected the impact and picked out spectral lines, the chemical fingerprints, of sodium and lithium gas in the debris cloud, lasting five to 10 minutes. ESO said the sodium probably came from lunar soil, while the lithium may have come from the rocket itself. A full analysis is still to come.

Rocket Lab (US) - US government contract award - $397m to fund the launch and operation of "Flatellite" satellites for airborne threat tracking. Flatellites will fly on Neutron, which is expected to launch for the first time later this year. Rocket Lab's new Munich-based optical-terminal unit (ex-Mynaric) is a direct Mbryonics competitor. Rocket Lab investor release, 4 August 2026

The best person for your next role might not live near your office—or even in the same country.

More companies are realizing they don't need to open entities everywhere just to access global talent. Instead, they're using EOR to hire internationally faster, stay compliant, and avoid building local infrastructure before they're ready.

Oyster's EOR helps companies hire, pay, and support employees in 180+ countries while Oyster handles payroll, compliance, taxes, and local employment requirements.

See how it works

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

ESA BASS (Business Applications and Space Solutions) — rolling open calls under the ACCESS programme umbrella; Kick-Starts up to €75,000 at 75% funding, deadline 28 August 2026; proof-of-concept/pilot projects up to €600,000 accepted on a rolling basis. Ireland subscribes via ESA Space Solutions Centre Ireland. No new thematic call this week. business.esa.int/funding

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.

Rocket Lab was due to fly its first Electron since the end of June this week, carrying QPS-SAR-13 for iQPS from the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand. The Japanese company is building a constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites that image through cloud and at night, and is aiming for 24 satellites by May 2028 and 36 by 2030, with Rocket Lab as its main launch provider. The mission, 'The Grain Goddess Provides', was due to go on 30 June but aborted at the last second as the first-stage engines ignited. Rocket Lab has not publicly identified the cause, though iQPS says the company has completed its analysis and inspections, addressed the cause and confirmed the integrity of the rocket.

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

Know an Irish space startup we should cover?

Email [email protected]