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This week: Dr Padraig Doolan, Ireland’s national delegate to the European Space Agency, tells SpaceTech Ireland in an interview that the sector is “doing really well” and has passed the 2019 strategy’s target for companies working with ESA by more than a quarter. He also names three challenges that could slow it down: limited funding, the absence of Research Ireland from the Irish delegation, and a shortage of skilled workers. Setanta Space wins an investor award at UCD as it seeks €2m, an InnaLabs navigation system helps keep ESA’s Hera spacecraft on course as it begins surveying the asteroids DART hit, and Resonate Testing signs a deal with Canada’s Obruta. Two open calls close soon, and Mbryonics, Réaltra, Ubotica and Manna are among the companies hiring.

Ireland’s national delegate to the European Space Agency says the sector is “doing really well” but he names three challenges to further growth: more ESA opportunities than Ireland has money for, the absence of the State’s research agency from the Irish delegation, and a shortage of skilled workers.

Dr Padraig Doolan, Ireland’s delegate to ESA at Enterprise Ireland, said the number of Irish companies working with the agency had reached 126 by the end of 2025, and has grown since. In 2019, when the government published its National Space Strategy for Enterprise with a target of 100 companies by 2025, there were 76.

Irish companies won a record €25.3 million in ESA contracts last year, according to the Space Activities in Ireland 2025 report published last week.

“We had a headline goal in that strategy to have 100 companies engaging, and we have 126 now reported at the end of 2025,” Doolan said in an interview with SpaceTech Ireland. “So we’ve blown through that target by more than a quarter. We’re really delighted with how that strategy was a success.”

The delegation’s role is to act as a bridge between ESA, which can be hard to follow from the outside, and the Irish companies that want its business. Doolan and his colleagues sit on the agency’s programme boards, where new programmes are agreed and tenders are drawn up, in areas ranging from Earth observation and launchers to navigation, science and exploration.

“We’re there to ensure that the Irish public and the interests of Irish SMEs are heard at the policy level and the programme board level in ESA,” he said.

“So we’re attending these meetings, shaping policy at the same time, spotting the opportunities that are coming down the tracks and then matching them to our client companies at the right time, teeing them up, saying ‘get ready for this one’. And then they can engage or not as they see fit.”

“It’s a lot of meetings. It’s tens of thousands of pages of paperwork every year. It’s site visits with companies. It’s a lot of relationship management. It’s salesmanship. It’s diplomacy. We’re kind of international matchmakers.”

Of the three challenges he raised, Doolan said the gap on the research side was probably the biggest one. Research Ireland, the State’s research funding agency, and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS) are not represented on the Irish delegation, so they do not see the opportunities that come up at ESA for Irish research groups.

“They do undertake space-relevant and space-adjacent activities. There’s Space Week, there’s Science Week, and many of the researchers that we work with are Research Ireland funded,” he said.

“But Research Ireland and DFHERIS are not on board ESA with us, and that’s holding Ireland back.”

“In an ideal world, the enterprise side, which is our sole focus, would work hand in hand with the R&I side. Together, we’d complement each other, we’d identify those synergies and identify joint academic-industry proposals that we could together take forward with ESA.”

He was at pains to add that both bodies are relatively new. “In their defence, they’re a new department, they’re a new agency. They must have a million things that needed to be done last week, and then I’m adding something else in there,” he said. “The officials I have engaged with on this appear quite positive and engaged. It definitely strikes me that there is interest there.”

Doolan said he was taking responsibility for bringing about the change, adding that he has laid out a pathway to engagement via which the two bodies could join the delegation.

The second challenge is money. The government committed €170 million to ESA programmes up to 2030 at the agency’s ministerial council in Bremen last November, an increase of €40 million on its previous commitment. Doolan called it “a huge statement of Irish intent”.

“The bottom line is that we can always spend more money than we’ve got, so we always have to cut our cloth to suit our measure,” he said. “We have more opportunities than we can support in ESA.”

That’s tied to the way ESA spends its budget (€7.68 billion in 2025). Each member state decides which programmes to join and how much to put into them, and the agency then aims to award contracts to that country’s companies and research bodies of roughly the same value. Irish companies can generally bid only for work in programmes Ireland has paid into, so the size of the Irish contribution sets a limit on how much they can win.

The third challenge is people. A recent report, Beyond the Horizon, found that the space workforce was not growing fast enough to keep up with the industry, and Doolan said that came as no surprise.

“It’s a problem that really afflicts a lot of high-tech industries, so space is no exception to the rule,” he said. “Finding enough people to fill those valuable high-tech jobs in Ireland’s growing economy, exactly the kind of jobs we want, is challenging. I wasn’t surprised to see that conclusion at all.”

Skills and training are not part of Enterprise Ireland’s remit, he said, and fall instead to DFHERIS and the Department of Education. But the shortage will be felt by the companies the delegation works with. “It probably is going to hold back the industry from growing if they can’t get the right people,” he said.

The National Space Strategy for Enterprise ran from 2019 to 2025 and has not yet been replaced. Doolan said the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment was working on a new version, but that Ireland’s EU Council Presidency had likely slowed progress because officials had more pressing matters to deal with.

“In the absence of a new strategy we’ll continue deploying the old one, because it has worked, it continues to work,” he said. “We don’t need a new document to show us the way.”

The work itself is changing. In 2019 Irish ESA activity was mainly in launchers, telecoms and Earth observation. Doolan said Irish companies were now also working on structures, composite materials, microelectronics, photonics and radio-frequency technology, and he expected new technologies to follow.

“We’re heavily looking at AI right across the whole organisation, and no less in space, and ESA is looking at it itself,” he said. “Robotics, there’s lots of opportunities. Advanced manufacturing, and also life sciences, because we do have medtech and life sciences companies here in Ireland, and it’s best to work with what you have already on the ground and apply it to the space supply chain.”

ESA ministers will meet in Rome on 15 December to decide Europe’s plans for human and robotic exploration. Doolan, who is also Ireland’s exploration delegate, said the meeting would be “all about exploration” and about “identifying a more ambitious path for Europe in the realm of human crewed space exploration”. Ireland’s own involvement in exploration is small, he said. Its interest lies in supplying technology rather than in crewed missions.

“We’d be seeking to put the right SMEs in to support the right activity.”

One of Ireland’s newest space companies, Setanta Space won the One to Watch Award at the investor showcase that closed UCD’s 2026 AI Ecosystem Accelerator. The six-month programme is run by NovaUCD with CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI. Ten start-ups finished this year’s programme, and together they are looking for €17m in pre-seed and seed funding.

Setanta was founded in 2025 by engineers who had worked on ESA missions, among them James Murphy and Adam Taylor. It designs AI software and modular onboard computers for satellites and spacecraft. Its new product is Vertis, a software tool.

Murphy, the CEO, said it would let engineers put AI on satellites, drones and other resilient systems “with one click of a button”, a job he said now takes weeks. He said the company is “raising a €2 million pre-seed round to launch Vertis”.

In September Setanta announced a €3m funding drive for its Danu onboard computer, but Murphy told SpaceTech Ireland the company had since cut the target.

“We were able to reduce the raise ask by focusing the raise on the Vertis development. This allows us to focus the spend more around team expansion and company growth.”

Setanta is an Enterprise Ireland client company and joined ESA BIC Ireland this year.

🚀 ESA’s Hera spacecraft has begun surveying the Didymos asteroid pair from 25 km away, four years after NASA’s DART probe struck the smaller one, Dimorphos, and shortened its orbit by about 33 minutes. Next month Hera moves in to about 20 km. After that comes a close-up survey of the DART impact site, the release of two shoebox-sized CubeSats and, eventually, a landing on Dimorphos. Part of what keeps Hera pointing the right way is Irish: its ARIETIS-NS gyroscope navigation system was designed and built by InnaLabs in Blanchardstown.

🚀 Resonate Testing in Newry, featured in the August 27 edition of SpaceTech Ireland, has signed an agreement with Canadian company Obruta Space Solutions. Resonate will test and qualify Obruta’s autonomous docking kit, and the two firms will open doors for each other in European and North American markets. Obruta’s software has already been tested on NASA’s robots inside the International Space Station.

France orders new spy satellites from Airbus and Thales Alenia Space

France’s defence procurement agency has awarded Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space a contract worth more than €1.5 billion to build two IRIS military Earth observation satellites. Airbus will supply both satellite platforms, a large share of the first satellite’s imaging payload and the ground segment, while Thales Alenia Space develops a next-generation payload for the second satellite. IRIS will gradually replace France’s three CSO reconnaissance satellites.

This week’s edition is supported by HubSpot for Startups. Their offer is aimed at early-stage companies setting up sales and marketing systems, relevant to some of the founders reading this

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CASSINI Hackathon, Irish round: 27–29 November, NCI Dublin

National College of Ireland and Irish Manufacturing Research are hosting the Irish round of the 12th EU CASSINI Hackathon. It is one of 10 rounds running across Europe that weekend. The theme is “EU Space for Peace and Resilience”, and teams choose from three challenges: protecting critical services and infrastructure from cyberattack, using space data to improve crisis response, and tracking cross-border crime and terrorism. Registration closes on 20 November, and finalists pitch at a Demo Day on 2 December. Contact Rob Conway-Kenny at ESA Phi-Lab Ireland: [email protected]. Register here | cassini.eu

ESA Road and Traffic Safety call: closes 27 November

ESA wants proposals for services that use satellites to make roads safer. The call is part of its Business Applications programme, and the money goes to proof-of-concept studies and pilot projects. The examples ESA gives include vehicles sharing speed, position and hazard warnings with each other and with roadside equipment, faster detection of road defects, congestion monitoring, and systems that warn pedestrians and cyclists of danger. Satellites could contribute through Earth observation (road conditions and weather hazards), satellite navigation, or satellite communications for vehicles in remote areas. The call gives no budget figure. Speak to Enterprise Ireland before applying. Call page

PICTURE: Starship goes for the double catch

SpaceX is targeting Friday for Starship Flight 15 from Starbase, Texas. Pending FAA approval, a 75-minute window opens at 22:45 Irish time. The plan is to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship upper stage in the launch tower’s mechanical arms. The tower has caught the booster three times but has never caught a Ship. The flight will also carry 26 Starlink V3 satellites, which SpaceX says match the capacity of about 10 Falcon 9 launches. Falcon 9 is already being wound down. SpaceX is reportedly no longer taking Falcon 9 bookings beyond 2028.

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

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