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

This week: Irish firms are turning up in some unexpected places - inside the structure of a gravitational wave detector, on the floor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, at a semiconductor expo in Seoul. Northern Ireland’s ‘space ready’ firms are at London’s Space-Comm Expo en masse. There’s a notable funding deadline on March 27 and Phi-Lab in Mullingar has named its first two Irish tenants.

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The Phi-Lab at Irish Manufacturing Research in Mullingar is open. It is one of 10 ESA-backed centres across Europe, giving companies with proven space technology access to specialist facilities, lab time and mentoring to solve manufacturing or engineering problems they cannot tackle alone. Its first two tenants are both Irish.

Mbryonics of Galway builds hardware that lets satellites communicate using light rather than radio signals. As satellite mega-constellations like the EU's IRIS² programme scale up, demand for this technology is increasing. To keep pace, Mbryonics needs to move from building each unit by hand to higher-volume production. The Phi-Lab project applies additive manufacturing - advanced 3D printing - to develop production-line output. The company opened its Photon-1 manufacturing facility in Galway last year and is hiring for multiple roles.

Ubotica of Dublin makes AI processors that fly on satellites, allowing them to analyse images in orbit rather than transmitting everything back to Earth. Its CogniSAT platform is already flight-proven and has been tested with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Phi-Lab project partners Ubotica with IMR to build a simulation framework for qualifying higher-power commercial processors for the conditions of low-Earth orbit — drawing on thermal and mechanical modelling expertise that IMR holds in-house.

Companies interested in the coming round should register with IMR or AMBER for advance notice of the call launch. Details will appear at esaphilab.ie.

NI Space and Invest Northern Ireland are on the floor at Space-Comm Expo Europe in London this week, with a raft of companies on stand B41. The companies are all graduates of the NI Space Ready Programme, a UK Space Agency-backed initiative funded through the Ecosystem Development Programme's Devolved Administration Fund for Northern Ireland.

The programme was designed to give Northern Ireland's advanced manufacturing base the sector knowledge it needs to target space industry primes like Airbus Defence & Space, Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space.

NI SPACE Cluster Manager Robert Hill: "We have the talent and the technical know-how, and now is the time to showcase our engineering and manufacturing expertise to the right people within the space sector - demonstrating the vital role Northern Ireland can play in advanced space technology."

The exhibitors: Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre (AMIC), ANGOKA, CCP Gransden, DATUM, Denroy, IPC Mouldings, LPE, McGreevy Engineering, Moat Consultancy, NI Precision, NUMA Innovation, Raptor Photonics, Resonate Testing and Short Brothers.

Northern Ireland's advanced manufacturing sector contributes £3.2 billion annually to the local economy, employing around 42,000 people. Core strengths — precision engineering, composites, advanced plastics, photonics and smart nanotechnologies — map directly onto upstream space supply-chain requirements.

Celtonn appeared at this week’s Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona alongside companies including Sateliot at the ESA Connectivity and Secure Communications stand.

Celtonn's hardware operates in the millimetre-wave frequency bands used by both advanced satellites and next-generation 6G mobile networks.

The company also attended a private dinner organised by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland alongside Dassault Systèmes, Telefónica, Benetel, Cubic³ and Cellusys, joined by TD Frank Feighan and Ireland's Ambassador to Spain Brian Glynn.

At MWC, ESA and GSMA Foundry announced a new round of Innovation Challenges across four pillars - AI × NTN (satellite connectivity integrated with mobile networks), Direct-to-Device (satellites connecting directly to phones without ground infrastructure), 5G/6G Hubs and 6G Innovation - backed by up to €100 million in ESA member-state funding from CM25 subscriptions to the Space for 5G/6G And Sustainable Connectivity programme.

Ireland subscribed at CM25. For any Irish company working in the satellite-terrestrial convergence space, the funding pipeline that opened at MWC is worth watching.

Dublin-based OCE Technology was at Semicon Korea 2026 in Seoul, supported by Enterprise Ireland Asia. OCE builds radiation-hardened processors, memories and operating systems for spacecraft - components engineered to keep working in the high-radiation environment of space, where standard electronics would fail.

Its flagship product, OCEOS, is a real-time operating system for satellites: software that manages onboard tasks with the precise timing and reliability required for spaceflight. OCEOS is one of only two operating systems holding ESA's highest safety qualification for mission-critical use.

The company, headquartered at NovaUCD, won an ESA contract in 2023 and already operates through distributor networks in Korea, China and Singapore.

The Semicon Korea appearance last month is part of a broader push into Asian semiconductor and space markets, where demand for radiation-tolerant components is growing as commercial constellation programmes scale up.

OHB System AG / Thales Alenia Space - €16.5M (Phase B2) German prime contractor OHB System AG has placed a €16.5 million Phase B2 contract with Thales Alenia Space to design, build and test the propulsion subsystem for ESA's LISA mission - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, a constellation of three spacecraft flying 2.5 million kilometres apart to detect gravitational waves.

Follow-on phases are expected to bring the total propulsion contract to €89.5 million. In Ireland, the context is what sits underneath that propulsion system. ÉireComposites in Galway is manufacturing the carbon-fibre central tubes that form the backbone of each LISA satellite, covering the full composites production chain from autoclave curing to non-destructive inspection.

LISA, targeted for 2035, is billed as "the largest machine that humanity has ever built."

Separately, Tyndall National Institute in Cork has completed a multi-year ESA project stress-testing photonic components for the mission's laser metrology system, the instrument that will measure spacetime ripples across those 2.5 million kilometres. Tyndall's reliability dataset will feed into ESA's decisions on which components fly when LISA launches.

Mynaric - ESA HydRON Element 3 Germany's Mynaric has been selected by ESA for Element 3 of HydRON (High Throughput Optical Network), covering in-orbit testing and validation of laser communications terminals for the programme's User Segment. HydRON sits within ESA's ScyLight programme and aims to build Europe's first terabit-per-second optical data relay network in space.

Optical inter-satellite links are the same technology area where Galway's Mbryonics is building hardware - its Phi-Lab project at IMR Mullingar is focused on scaling production of optical communications units. As ESA ramps investment through HydRON and related programmes, it creates more opportunity for Irish suppliers in that space.

ESA's Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS) programme, now operating under the ACCESS framework, has its next Kick-start batch deadline on Friday, March 27, 2026 at 13:00 CET.

Kick-starts are six-month feasibility studies funded at 75% by ESA, up to €75,000 per contract. Proposals must involve at least one space asset — satellite communications, Earth observation data or satellite navigation. You can submit at any time; evaluation happens in batches. Ireland is an eligible participating state.

Remaining 2026 batch deadlines: May 29 · August 28 · October 30​

ESA Earth Observation and CDL-Milan are accepting applications for the 3rd CommEO Award, targeting pre-seed and seed-stage startups building downstream Earth Observation solutions in Resilience, Climate or Infrastructure. First-round pitch: Milan, April 13. Top five advance to the final at ESA's EO Commercialisation Forum in Seville, May 12–14. Prizes include a guaranteed CDL Space interview, a €25,000 ESA data voucher and a €10,000 OVHcloud computing voucher.

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🚀 Pilot Photonics opens at Tyndall in Cork. The company, a spin-out of Dublin City University and Tyndall, builds optical frequency comb laser sources: chips that emit multiple synchronised wavelengths simultaneously, replacing banks of individual lasers and reducing cost, size and power consumption. Pilot has existing ESA contracts in optical communications and atomic clock technology, and is already funding joint projects with the Irish Photonic Integration Centre at Tyndall.

🚀 ESA joins O-RAN Alliance ESA has joined the Open Radio Access Network Alliance, an industry body working to make mobile network components from different manufacturers interoperable. The move is aimed at advancing seamless satellite-to-smartphone connectivity, a building block for the hybrid networks that will underpin 6G - where satellites and ground-based mobile infrastructure are expected to work as a single system.

🚀 Kairos fails for third time. Japan’s Space One said it activated the Kairos rocket’s flight termination system just over a minute after blast off from Spaceport Kii, destroying the rocket and its cargo of five small satellites. It follows failures in March and December 2024. Space One, whose backers include Canon, has yet to place a single satellite in orbit.

“The conviction was always there, but the early months were unforgiving. Endurance is something our team understands well” - Aoife Kelly, co-founder, Celtonn (Irish Times)

“By offering funding access for AI, NTN, and D2D, we are not just developing technology, we are preparing for the seamless, global 6G infrastructure of tomorrow” - Laurent Jaffart, ESA Director of Resilience, Navigation and Connectivity (MWC Barcelona)

“Space remains borderless, but it is increasingly shaped by geopolitical tensions and competing global interests” - Chiara Della Valle, satellite industry executive (MWC Barcelona, March 2)

PICTURE: A SpaceX Falcon 9 blasts off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on March 4 to successfully deploy 29 Starlink satellites. SpaceX now has around 10,000 Starlinks in orbit.

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

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