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

This week: Houston's Intuitive Machines is buying Goonhilly Earth Station for £37 million, removing Europe's last independent commercial deep-space ground station and brightening the outlook for Cork's mothballed 32-metre dish at Elfordstown. Ubotica signs a US partnership with NOVI Space and joins the Irish defence-industry trade body. Lios lands a third ESA contract worth nearly €2m. Mbryonics has around 22 roles open in Galway. ESA Kick-starts deadline is 29 May.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines announced last week that it is buying the UK’s Goonhilly Earth Station, Europe’s last independent commercial deep-space communications provider. The £37 million deal removes Europe's last independent commercial deep-space ground station - and may help unlock funding for Cork’s dormant 32-metre dish at Elfordstown.

Goonhilly's antennas have supported missions for ESA, ispace and Intuitive Machines itself. ESA's own deep-space stations at Cebreros in Spain, New Norcia in Western Australia, and Malargüe in Argentina are ring-fenced for the agency's science missions. Everything outside that - communications for commercial lunar landers, deep-space data - went through the Cornwall site.

For Rory Fitzpatrick, CEO of the National Space Centre at Elfordstown, the deal is a function of Brexit.

"Goonhilly, and the UK space industry at the moment, is feeling the pressure of leaving the European Union. They would be the main driver in Europe right at the moment if it wasn't for that. This is an area that's really, really starting to hurt the UK space industry."

Steve Altemus, Intuitive Machines' co-founder and chief executive, said the acquisition would underpin a single integrated network covering communications, navigation and data transport for lunar and cislunar missions.

The two sites have some shared history: In January 2023, Goonhilly hired in a temporary tracking system to NSC's site to provide telemetry for Virgin Orbit's Start Me Up launch from Cornwall. The mission failed when the second stage shut down prematurely.

"Our connection with Goonhilly is that when the British were launching their spy satellite through Virgin Orbit, they had to track it from Cork because they couldn't see it from Goonhilly," Fitzpatrick said. The system was operated jointly for the launch attempt and removed afterwards. The two companies have since competed for some of the same contracts but "there isn't huge overlap."

The Goonhilly sale creates an opening for Elfordstown. NSC's 32-metre antenna was commissioned in the mid-1980s and mothballed in 1997 when transatlantic fibre arrived. It is one of around 25 of its kind left in the world.

"Our asset is one of a dwindling number of assets that are available to the European Union," Fitzpatrick told SpaceTech Ireland. "That is something that will be, in the medium to longer term, good news for Ireland and good news for us as a company."

NSC signed a memorandum of understanding last December with the South Korean ground-station operator Contec Space Group to refurbish the dish and return it to service. NSC has now set up a separate non-profit vehicle, The Big Dish Company, to take the work forward. As a private company, NSC cannot directly access state research funding, which in Ireland flows through universities. The non-profit can. It also gives the infrastructure a guarantee against being scrapped if commercial economics turn against it.

The capital required is modest by space-infrastructure standards.

"For the Big Dish, we reckon that we'll need about €5 million to get it up and running for the first year or two. Then probably another €2 or €3 million invested over five or 10 years.

“That gives you space communications to the Moon and Mars, deep-space radio astronomy. It's essential stuff for Europe as part of its future in space. It would cost €35 million to replace."

"We've had meetings with NASA, and they will use the dish if we refurb it," Fitzpatrick said. "We have Iberian operators, we have the European Space Agency, we have NASA. They'll all use the dish."

Ireland signed the Artemis Accords on 4 May, which Fitzpatrick is hopeful may help unlock the American route.

NSC has fielded acquisition or investment approaches already in 2026. "We've had a couple of offers already this year. I would expect that will grow over the next few years, because there's a lot of money for infrastructure. At the moment, people want to buy anything they can."

Fitzpatrick links the appetite to the same flow of capital reshaping Western asset markets - pension funds, sovereign wealth, infrastructure vehicles searching for hard assets with long-duration cashflows.

The Big Dish Company is still around three years away from becoming operational. Fitzpatrick is meeting financiers in Dublin this week.

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Dublin-based Ubotica Technologies has signed a strategic partnership with Texas-based NOVI Space to run its onboard AI software on NOVI's GENIE smart-satellite platform. The deal is the latest step in a shift Ubotica has been pushing for years: from satellites that take pictures to satellites that make decisions.

Most Earth observation satellites capture imagery, beam it to ground stations, and leave the analysis until hours or days later. Ubotica's SPACE:AI platform processes raw sensor data onboard, delivering intelligence within 90 seconds of capture and downlinking only the resulting insights. A recent operational test over Singapore port analysed hundreds of vessels in under two minutes, flagging "dark ships" that had switched off their AIS transponders. The full image came down days later.

Ubotica flew the first AI inference in orbit - a single run of a trained model on new data, in this case identifying clouds in imagery - on ESA's Phi Sat-1. It operates the first commercial AI satellite, CogniSAT-6, and has now logged over 300,000 inferences in orbit. The NOVI partnership runs SPACE:AI on NOVI's onboard computer, the core of the GENIE constellation.

The NOVI deal caps a busy month for Ubotica, following a NASA JPL collaboration on the FAME federated EO network last month and a Planet–ESA SkySat agreement in April. Target markets named are maritime security, critical infrastructure protection, and time-critical surveillance.

Ubotica also joined the Irish Defence and Security Association this week. IDSA, whose confirmed members include Lockheed Martin, Saab and KNDS, is Ireland's defence and security trade body and represents Ireland on the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD), a Brussels-based industry association.

🚀 Europe's largest small-satellite conference, smallsateurope, runs in Amsterdam 26–28 May. Defence and security topics are integrated into the main programme this year, a notable shift. Details and registration at smallsateurope.com.

🚀 25 May — ATU Space Industry Event, Sligo. RISE@ATU hosts an event for SMEs aimed at building awareness of the space sector and how local industries can become part of the value chain. Confirmed speakers include Rob Conway-Kenny, manager of ESA Phi-Lab Ireland, and Dr Patricia Moore, co-founder and director of the Irish Space Association. Booking via ATU Sligo on Eventbrite.

🚀 SMILE launches - ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched their joint SMILE mission on Vega-C from Kourou on 19 May. The spacecraft will produce the first X-ray images of Earth's magnetosphere over a three-year mission. UK (Leicester, UCL) and Spain (Airbus DS) led the European contributions.

Dublin-based Lios has secured a third development contract with the European Space Agency, worth nearly €2 million in co-funding over two years, to qualify its SoundBounce acoustic material for spaceflight.

The contract, part of ESA's Future Launchers Preparatory Programme, will scale up manufacturing of SoundBounce panels and run flight qualification testing. SoundBounce is designed to line the inside of launch vehicle fairings — the nose cones that shield satellites during launch — absorbing the noise and vibration that can damage sensitive payloads. Lios says the material has already cut fairing weight by 50% in earlier phases.

Founded in 2009 by Rhona Togher and Eimear O'Carroll, Lios is working with two European space manufacturers on the project, which it has been on since 2021.

Barry Jennings, Enterprise Ireland's National Delegate to ESA, called it "a significant achievement" and a boost for Ireland's space sector.

ESA's Business Applications team is taking proposals for Kick-starts — six-month feasibility studies for services that use satellite communications, Earth observation or satnav data. Open to businesses of any size and any sector.

ESA covers 75% of costs, up to €75,000 per contract. The next batch deadline is Friday 29 May at 13:00 CET, with further batches in August and October.

Irish applicants need a Letter of Authorisation from Enterprise Ireland's Barry Jennings, ESA National Delegate, before submitting a full proposal. Worth emailing him early rather than the day before.

Details: business.esa.int/funding

PICTURE: SpaceX is set to launch Starship Flight 12 from Starbase, Texas, Thursday at 11:30pm Irish time. It's the first flight of the new Version 3 Starship - the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing over 400 feet. The booster will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico while the upper stage heads for a near-orbital trajectory and a planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is using the flight to test upgraded Raptor engines, a new heat shield, and engine relight in space, with 22 Starlink test satellites along for the ride.

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

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