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

This week: Dublin's Pilot Photonics picked up two wins at OFC 2026 in Los Angeles, landing a deal with UK startup Finchetto and joining an industry standards body alongside Microsoft. The European Commission opened its €91 million Horizon Europe space call with a September deadline - we break down where Irish companies fit. And Cork has a stake in a ‘Lost in Space’ comeback story…

Dublin laser company Pilot Photonics had a busy week at OFC 2026, the optical communications industry's flagship conference in Los Angeles.

The DCU spin-out announced that UK startup Finchetto has selected its nanosecond tunable laser for use in an all-optical network switch.

In plain terms, Finchetto is building a device that routes data inside data centres entirely using light, without converting it to electrical signals and back again. The company says this approach could cut power consumption by up to 20 times and latency by up to 40 times compared with conventional electronic switches.

The catch is that you need a laser that can switch wavelengths fast enough to keep up with individual data packets. Finchetto says Pilot's laser is the fastest it could find on the market.

Separately, Pilot Photonics joined the Advanced Photonics Coalition, an industry standards body that now has more than 50 members including Microsoft. The coalition develops manufacturing and interoperability standards for silicon photonics and co-packaged optics, the technologies expected to bolster the next generation of data centre infrastructure.

More than 700 companies exhibited at OFC 2026, as AI-driven bandwidth demand reshapes the optical networking industry.

McKinsey estimates that production of high-speed optical transceivers will fall 40 to 60 per cent short of demand through 2027.

Pilot Photonics was founded in 2011 as a spin-out from DCU, commercialising optical frequency comb research conducted at DCU, Trinity College Dublin, and the Tyndall National Institute. The company has raised approximately €9.4 million to date and holds ESA contracts for space-related laser work alongside its data centre business.

ESA has reconnected with its Proba-3 Coronagraph satellite after more than a month of silence - welcome news for Cork too, given that sensors developed at the city's Onsemi facility are what keep the mission flying.

The spacecraft started to wobble on 14 February when an onboard anomaly drained its batteries and sent it tumbling at 60,500 km above Earth. Recovery came when engineers spotted sunlight briefly catching the solar panels as the craft rotated, seized the window, and got a signal through.

"Some miracle happened because we reconnected," ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said Thursday. ESA will now power up instruments and assess damage.

Proba-3 uses two spacecraft flying in precise formation to create artificial solar eclipses for corona observation. The millimetre-precision alignment that makes this possible relies on silicon photomultiplier sensors developed by Onsemi in Cork -technology that originated at Cork startup SensL, which ESA contracted back in 2011, seven years before Onsemi acquired it.

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Peter O'Brien, who heads the Photonics Packaging and Systems Integration group at Tyndall National Institute in Cork, has received the 2025 SEMI European Award for his work advancing photonic-electronic packaging technologies across Europe. The award was presented at SEMI's Industry Strategy Symposium in Sopot, Poland, on 12 March.

O'Brien runs the PIXAPP pilot line, Europe's dedicated facility for packaging photonic integrated circuits at scale. He also leads the advanced packaging element of PIXEurope, the EU Chips Act photonics pilot line, and directs the European Photonics Academy. His group has secured more than €40 million in research funding from the European Commission, Science Foundation Ireland, ESA and DARPA over the past six years.

Why it matters for space: several Irish space companies work in or adjacent to photonics, including Pilot Photonics (a DCU/Tyndall spin-out that builds comb laser sources for satellite communications), Mbryonics (optical terminals for inter-satellite links) and Celtonn (semiconductor hardware for satellite missions).

The packaging infrastructure O'Brien has built at Tyndall helps bridge the gap between laboratory-stage photonic components and products that can be manufactured at the volumes and reliability levels the space sector demands.

Last month, Tyndall was also named as Ireland's lead partner in P4Q, a new €50 million European initiative to develop manufacturing processes for quantum photonic chips across 12 countries.

NASA's first crewed Moon mission in more than 50 years is targeting an April 1 liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The four-person crew, three Americans and one Canadian, will fly around the Moon and return, a journey of roughly 10 days.

If you want to watch the launch live, be prepared for a late night. Windows run from late on 1 April through 03:36 on the morning of 7 April.

🚀 Artemis II - April launch opportunities (Irish time)

📆 1 Apr - 23:24 📆 2 Apr - 00:53 📆 3 Apr - 00:22 📆 4 Apr - 01:00 📆 5 Apr - 01:53 📆 6 Apr - 02:40 📆 7 Apr - 03:36

NASA will confirm the final launch date closer to the time. Coverage will be live on NASA TV.

Airmo (Germany) - €5 million Seed - Germany's Airmo closed a €5 million seed round led by Ananda Impact Ventures to develop a compact methane-detection sensor for small satellites. The Berlin startup is targeting high-precision emissions monitoring from low Earth orbit.

ENPULSION (Austria) - €22.5 million from Munich-based Nordwind Growth to fund US market expansion; the company has delivered more than 320 electric propulsion systems to orbit with over 500 years of cumulative flight time.

D-Orbit (Italy) - $128 million in first-tranche Series D funding from Azimut Group as it continues a European acquisition spree that has already absorbed Planetek Italia.

Horizon Europe's 2026 space call is now open. Here's what matters for Irish companies.

The European Commission opened its annual Horizon Europe space research call on 10 March, with €91 million available across eight topics. The deadline for all of them is 3 September.

The call is part of Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry and Space), managed by HaDEA. Ireland has drawn down more than €151 million from Cluster 4 to date, and the Government's new Horizon Europe Action Plan, published last month, is explicitly targeting higher SME participation.

The Action Plan sets out four priorities: deeper engagement with universities through tailored supports and better alignment with research priorities; higher SME participation through targeted outreach, clearer signposting of financial supports and stronger links between companies and research centres; more Irish-led consortium bids, backed by mentoring, training and reduced administrative burden; and a pipeline of new applicants, including early-career researchers and first-time bidders, supported through champions networks and career sustainability measures.

Three areas stand out for Irish companies:

1 - Earth observation and satellite communications. Two topics fund digital building-blocks and demonstration missions for EO and satcom, the kind of work being done by Skytek, Ubotica and Réaltra. 2 - Space Data Analysis, where Ubotica's on-board AI processing and university research groups working with Copernicus data would be well placed. 3 - Critical Space Components for European non-dependence, covering radiation-hard electronics, semiconductor substrates, irradiation test facilities and refuelling systems. Companies such as InnaLabs, Mbryonics and ÉireComposites have relevant capabilities here.

Last year's space call attracted 93 proposals, funded 27 of them, and channelled nearly a quarter of the budget to SMEs.

The call page is on the EU Funding and Tenders Portal under HORIZON-CL4-2026-SPACE-03.

Most people know GPS. Fewer know that Europe has its own version, called Galileo, which has been operating from high orbit for several years. What is less well known is that ESA is now testing something designed to operate beneath Galileo and make the whole system work better.

The mission is called Celeste. Its first two small satellites, IOD-1 and IOD-2, are scheduled to lift off no earlier than 24 March, aboard Rocket Lab's Electron rocket from the company's Māhia Launch Complex in New Zealand. They will spend the rest of the year testing navigation signals from low Earth orbit, roughly 500 to 560 kilometres up, well below where Galileo operates.

Signals from lower orbit are stronger and arrive faster. That would boost signals in places where current satnav struggles: city centres with tall buildings, the Arctic, indoors, and anywhere someone is trying to jam or spoof a signal. Celeste is designed to prove that a small constellation in low orbit can fill those gaps while also improving timing accuracy for things like power grids, financial systems and 5G networks.

The full Celeste demonstrator will eventually comprise 11 satellites plus a spare, with the complete set expected in orbit by around 2027. ESA has already approved a follow-on development phase after that, so this is not a one-off experiment but a step toward a potential operational system integrated into Europe's broader navigation infrastructure.

More than 50 companies and research groups from 14 European countries are involved. The programme is split between two industrial teams - one led by GMV in Spain, the other by Thales Alenia Space - with specialist firms supplying antennas, timing hardware and satellite platforms.

Ireland is not among the 14 participating countries. ESA has opened the experimentation phase to companies from participating states, and a follow-on industrialisation phase has been approved - so it is worth watching whether Irish companies find a way in as the programme develops.

German launch company Isar Aerospace has pushed the second flight of its Spectrum rocket to no earlier than 23 March, citing poor weather at Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. The date remains subject to weather, safety and range clearance. Isar Aerospace is one of four firms selected for ESA's European Launcher Challenge. All four must demonstrate a successful orbital launch by 2027 to confirm their selection.

ESA is looking for mission concepts for satellite constellations that can shoot continuous video from Very Low Earth Orbit (250 to 350 km up), far closer than conventional observation spacecraft. The SysNova campaign wants complete mission designs, not individual technologies, with a benchmark of at least ten minutes of video at 15 frames per second, a budget under €50 million excluding launch, and readiness for in-orbit demonstration by 2030. Up to five teams will receive €120,000 each for a six-month study.

The Isar Aerospace flight, whenever it happens, is part of a larger European effort to build launch resilience. ESA's European Launcher Challenge, backed by roughly €900 million from member states at the November 2025 ministerial council, supports four commercial rocket companies: Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany), PLD Space (Spain), and MaiaSpace (France). A fifth, Orbex (UK) withdrew after entering insolvency in February.

Each stands to receive up to €169 million in contracts and co-funding.

The retirement of Ariane 5 in 2023 left the continent without independent heavy-lift access for more than a year, forcing sensitive institutional payloads onto American rockets. Ariane 6 has since restored that capability, with six flights completed and the four-booster Ariane 64 variant making a successful maiden flight in February carrying Amazon Leo satellites.

The Launcher Challenge is designed to build a broader, more resilient European launch ecosystem, with multiple providers operating from multiple sites, including Andøya in Norway and new facilities in French Guiana, Shetland and potentially mainland France and Spain.

PICTURE: ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot’s first picture taken from the International Space Station. The French woman took off in mid-February for a 9-month mission to the ISS where she will perform a series of scientific experiments. Credit: ESA

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

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