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

This week: Cork's Suas Aerospace is back with a €10m raise to fund Ireland's first commercial rocket launches. CEO Rory Fitzpatrick tells SpaceTech Ireland the project never stopped - it just got bigger. UCD wants a national space agency and a €30m research centre. SMILE finally launches from Kourou on Tuesday.

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Suas Aerospace has secured options on two Atlantic-facing sites on Ireland's west coast and holds letters of intent from seven European rocket companies, CEO Rory Fitzpatrick told SpaceTech Ireland. The Cork company is now raising €10m to fund Ireland's first commercial rocket launches.

"Once we get the money, then it's really down to how soon we can do an environmental study and engage with the local community," Fitzpatrick said. "Between the day we get funding and the first launch, you've got between eight and 18 months."

The €10m covers the first three launches and exercising the land option. The letters of intent come from French, German, Spanish and Italian rocket companies, none of which Fitzpatrick would name. He would not be drawn on the location of the two candidate sites beyond confirming both face the Atlantic.

"They're over the ocean - that's all I can say. A lot of boxes still need to be ticked, but we have the locations. We also have letters of intent from seven of the rocket companies who will launch with us. The seven of them have come back and given us letters saying yes, they will launch with us if we build our spaceport."

The funding target is modest by European launch standards. Germany's three private rocket companies - Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse - have each raised in the tens to hundreds of millions of euros. No European spaceport has been built on a €10m budget. Fitzpatrick's pitch is that Suas is not building rockets, but the ground infrastructure and licensing pathway for European launchers that have rockets but nowhere in northern Europe to fly them from.

The dream of an orbital rocket arcing over the western seaboard on its way to space appeared to have died a quiet death. But Fitzpatrick insists it is still very much alive.

When Suas Aerospace announced its Pathfinder mission in 2024, the headlines wrote themselves. Working with Dutch firm T-Minus Engineering, it would launch Ireland's first commercial rocket from the west coast by late 2025. The Pathfinder would use a smaller Dart rocket - a modest opening shot, but the first time a commercial rocket would leave Irish soil. Fitzpatrick called it a significant milestone for the country's space programme.

Suas would handle site acquisition and licensing. T-Minus would supply the propulsion, electronics and launch operations. The consortium had already secured €4.9m under Horizon Europe through EU-BEST, a project on interoperability between European launch test infrastructures.

Then it went quiet.

In October 2025, T-Minus announced two Barracuda rocket launches from Nova Scotia with Maritime Launch Services, on a timeline that overlapped with the Irish mission. The Pathfinder launch date drifted past late 2025 with no public update.

Fitzpatrick says the project never stopped. What changed was the scope.

"We're just about to raise the money to do the first three launches, sign contracts and secure the land. We have the agreement in place for the land. These would be two suborbital and possibly an orbital launch. Once they are done, we're then into commercial launch. For €10 million we need right now to do the first three. And to secure the land would also allow us to get the first three signed contracts. That's where we're at, at the moment."

The old argument about location still holds.

"You need to launch over the ocean. And in Europe, there's only a handful of places that you can make enough space to launch over ocean. Within Ireland, we also have tremendous universities, good-quality graduates. We have airports that deliver people to work in an hour and a half. Ireland ticks so many boxes compared to all the other locations that it became more and more relevant."

T-Minus Engineering is no longer the presumptive launch provider. "We might still use T-Minus. We're discussing things with them, and there are other options," Fitzpatrick said.

The Irish government has been supportive but cannot fund Suas directly, given state aid rules. The primary route to capital is private investors and European Commission programmes.

"They're very keen to have this happen. There isn't a way for them to fund us at the moment."

His longer term vision: one to two commercial launches a month within five years.

The National Space Centre is the operating business that gives the Suas plans credibility, and gives Fitzpatrick a working knowledge of the ground infrastructure side of the launch market.

NSC took over the Elfordstown teleport site outside Midleton in 2010. It now operates three teleports in Ireland - Cork, Tralee and Mayo - with Dublin and Midlands sites due online by early 2027. The longer plan is 10 teleports across Europe within three years.

The core business is uplinking and downlinking for satellite operators. The customer list runs from established broadcasters like SES and Eutelsat to the new low-earth-orbit constellations. Amazon's Project Kuiper switched on its NSC gateway in October, one of the first Kuiper gateways in Europe.

The timing has worked in Fitzpatrick's favour. When NSC took over Elfordstown in 2010, there were roughly 6,500 satellites in orbit. Starlink alone now operates several thousand, and constellations from Amazon, Eutelsat OneWeb and Rivada are still being built out. More are coming from India, China, Japan and Russia. Each constellation needs ground stations, and Ireland's geography - southerly, low radio-frequency noise, Atlantic-facing - sells itself.

The 32-metre C-band dish at Elfordstown is one of perhaps 25 left in the world, Fitzpatrick said, and largely dormant for a decade. He has set up a separate non-profit, The Big Dish Company, to refurbish and operate it. The intended customers are deep-space communications agencies.

NSC held a call with NASA the week before this interview about using the dish for lunar and Mars comms. Parallel conversations are running with the Korean Space Agency - Fitzpatrick travels to Seoul soon to speak at an event hosted by Contec, a Korean ground-station operator and NSC customer - and with ESA. Ireland's signing of the Artemis Accords, he said, may help unlock the NASA route.

As a private company, NSC cannot directly access state research funding, which in Ireland flows through universities. The non-profit structure of The Big Dish Company is partly a workaround, partly insurance that the dish does not end up scrapped if the economics turn against it.

Within five years, Fitzpatrick expects NSC to be working with European agencies and most of the major satellite fleets, with a training academy running on site. On Suas, the ambition is starker: a built spaceport launching one to two rockets a month.

“We'll be working with European-based systems for various different agencies…We'll be working with many of the satellite fleets to communicate with their assets in space. So that's what NSC will be at.

“We'll also hopefully have the academy training and teaching people on site on the various aspects of satellite communications. On Suas, we would hope to have the site built, fitted out and fully functioning, launching one to two [rockets] a month.”

UCD has launched its Space Strategy to 2030, setting out a five-year plan to position the university as a European leader in interdisciplinary space research and innovation, and to shape national policy ahead of two pending government documents - the forthcoming National Space Research and Innovation Strategy and an updated Irish Space Strategy for Enterprise.

The headline objective is €30m in funding for a UCD-led Space Research, Development & Innovation Centre, to be raised through a mix of internal university budgets, competitive grants, EU and ESA programmes, and industry partnerships. UCD also commits to launching two internationally recognised space education programmes by 2030, building on its MSc in Space Science & Technology, which now has more than 100 alumni.

UCD is openly advocating for the establishment of a national space agency and positioning itself as the key academic partner in that effort. It plans a Space Industry Fellowship Programme to embed industry professionals in UCD with reciprocal researcher placements in companies. And it calls for ESA PRODEX funding to be transferred to Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland to secure long-term national investment.

The strategy was developed through workshops and interviews with academics, industry, international experts, and government stakeholders. The full document is available at ucd.ie/space.

🚀 SMILE set for 19 May launch from Kourou The ESA-Chinese Academy of Sciences Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer lifts off from French Guiana on Tuesday aboard a Vega-C, six weeks after the original 9 April slot was stood down over a Vega-C subsystem production issue. SMILE carries a soft X-ray imager built at the University of Leicester - the first of its kind to observe Earth's magnetic field - and an ultraviolet imager that can watch the northern lights continuously for up to 45 hours. It is also the first Vega-C flight managed directly by Avio rather than Arianespace.

Creotech plans $118m raise to quadruple satellite output by 2029

Warsaw-listed Creotech Instruments plans to raise around $118m to fund a new satellite factory in Poland, targeting 40 satellites a year by 2029 - four times its current output. CEO Grzegorz Brona told SpaceNews the company hit $40.4m in space-sector revenue last year and turned its first net profit. A site is due to be chosen by the end of 2026.

Poland's ESA contribution rose from €198m in 2022 to €735m at the 2025 ministerial, making it one of the biggest contributors to the ESA budget.

Still live:

The Horizon Europe Space Research Call 2026 (€90.97m, deadline 3 September) remains open across eight topics. The European Defence Fund 2026 work programme is live with deadlines in two tranches across April and September. ESA's Business Applications Kick-start Open Call closes 29 May. The BASS Wildfires call closes 9 June.

PICTURE: Starship Version 3 at Starbase, Texas, ahead of its scheduled 19 May launch. This is the configuration SpaceX intends to fly operationally, with upgraded Raptor engines and a redesigned booster built for rapid reuse.

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

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