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

This week: The EU Space Act enters detailed Council negotiations - with Ireland now in the chair. ESA switches off Sentinel-1A - the satellite that gave Ireland an earth observation industry retires after 12 years. As students head off for summer internships, a young Limerick engineer joins the Extremely Large Telescope project in Chile. Plus an ESA market consultation closing 10 July, and six Junior Professional Programme posts closing 28 July.

The proposed EU Space Act - legislation that would create the first EU-wide rules for satellite operations, orbital safety and spectrum use - is in its detailed negotiation phase in the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. And from this week, it is Ireland that chairs the Council.

Ireland took over the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU on Wednesday, succeeding Cyprus, for a six-month term. The Presidency chairs Council meetings and brokers compromise between the 27 member states on legislation moving through the Council - including the Space Act.

For Irish space companies, it means their own government now holds the chair on the Council side of a file that will set the rules they operate under.

Space isn't a headline priority of the Irish programme, which centres on competitiveness, the EU's long-term budget, and the next research framework programme. But the Act is on the Council's active agenda: at the Competitiveness Council on 29 May, ministers were briefed on the progress report, and Ireland - then the incoming presidency - set out its research priorities.

The Council's May progress report flagged three areas still unresolved: how broadly the regulation should apply, how dual-use activities should be treated (technology and services with both civilian and military uses, normally outside EU civilian regulation), and how responsibility should be divided between EU-level authorities and national ones.

That third one matters most to Ireland. Under the current draft, national licensing authorities - the government bodies that grant space company licences in each EU country - would remain part of the system. What's still to be settled is how much authority they keep, and whether an EU-level layer of obligations lands on top of existing ESA and national requirements.

Industry groups have argued the draft risks creating parallel requirements that add cost without clarity. However, some member states favour a stronger EU-level role.

The Act is not yet final. Amendments remain possible through Ireland's 14 MEPs, and Irish companies can feed views through the Irish Space Association and Enterprise Ireland.

ESA switched off Sentinel-1A - the satellite that gave kicked-off an Earth observation industry in Ireland - on 29 June, ending a 12-year mission that outlasted its design life and laid the foundation for Europe's Copernicus Earth Observation programme.

Sentinel-1A launched on 3 April 2014. It carried Synthetic Aperture Radar - a satellite instrument that images the Earth's surface through cloud and at night, which optical satellites cannot do.

For more than a dozen years, its data was used to track Arctic sea ice and glacier retreat, map floods within hours of them happening, monitor illegal dumping at sea, and identify vessels operating with their transponders switched off.

It gave scientists, governments and emergency services a continuous radar picture of the planet, updated every few days.

The 29 June shutdown was a planned handover. In the weeks before, controllers at ESA's mission operations centre in Darmstadt moved Sentinel-1A, 1C and 1D into a synchronised orbit - the three satellites spaced so that when 1A was switched off, 1C and 1D would slot in and continue radar coverage without a gap.

Sentinel-1C began operating in April 2025; 1D's archive opened to users in April 2026. The mission continues under their names.

Nuno Miranda, ESA's Sentinel-1 Mission Manager, said in a statement: "Sentinel-1A holds a special place for all of us. As the first satellite of the Copernicus programme, it paved the way for new approaches in both operations and science. As we bid farewell to this remarkable satellite, we celebrate an extraordinary legacy and look forward with confidence as Sentinel-1C and Sentinel-1D carry that legacy into the years ahead."

Sentinel-1A's data was published under an open-access policy - every image released free to any user, commercial or academic.

That policy is the reason Ireland has an Earth observation industry. Maynooth University's applied EO group has developed maritime surveillance tools with Skytek and the Irish Coast Guard, built on Sentinel radar data through ESA's Atlantic Pathfinder project.

Analytics firms, university spin-outs, agri-tech and environmental companies have built products on the same free feed without ever having to buy satellite imagery. Sentinel-1C and 1D continue the open-access policy.

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Irish students and early-career engineers take up internships and traineeships at European space institutions each year - ESA's schemes across ESTEC, ESRIN and ESOC, ESO's studentship programme, and placements with the larger European primes. Ireland is a member state of both ESA and ESO, so Irish nationals are eligible to apply through the standard routes.

Among this year's cohort is Liam Moran, from Limerick, who posted that he has started an internship at the European Southern Observatory. He is working on the Extremely Large Telescope - the 39-metre optical telescope under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert, which will be the largest of its kind in the world when it comes into operation later this decade.

His work is on wavefront sensing and control: the systems that let the telescope adjust its mirror in real time to compensate for atmospheric turbulence, which blurs images taken from the ground.

He is using a Zernike wavefront sensor - an instrument that measures optical distortions - on ESO's GHOST testbench, a GPU-driven computing rig used to model how the telescope's mirror behaves. The ELT's primary mirror is made of hundreds of hexagonal segments that must be held to nanometre precision to work as a single surface.

The telescope, when complete, is expected to be able to directly image the atmospheres of planets around other stars.

🚀 CASSINI Challenges 2026 - EUSPA, the EU Agency for the Space Programme, announced its twelve winners yesterday, each receiving €100,000 for use of EU space assets in climate, biodiversity, secure communications and space traffic management. The winners span Germany, Finland, Switzerland and other European states. The next annual call opens in early Q1 2027 and is worth preparing for if your company builds on Galileo (the EU's global navigation satellite system), Copernicus (Earth observation) or EGNOS (satellite navigation augmentation).

🚀 🚀 ESA Teach with Space online conference — 8 and 9 July — ESA is running a two-day online conference for primary and secondary school teachers on 8 and 9 July, in English, with a certificate of participation for attendees. Free to attend. Registration through ESA Learn closes at noon CEST on Sunday 6 July. → learn.esa.int

OHB SE rights offer closes 8 July

Covered in full last week: the German space prime OHB SE is raising €510.7m through a combined KKR private placement and a minority shareholder rights offering on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The subscription period for the rights offering closes on Tuesday, 8 July. Irish supply chain companies working with OHB - Réaltra on PLATO, ATG Europe and ÉireComposites on LISA - will be dealing with a better-capitalised prime through the next phase of both missions.

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ESA BSGN Request for Information - closes 10 July

ESA's Business in Space Growth Network - a programme that funds commercial applications of space technology - has issued a Request for Information on scaling up commercial space markets. It is a structured market consultation: companies submit written responses to a set of questions, and the aggregated input shapes ESA's future funding priorities in the sectors covered.

Four sectors are in scope: health and life sciences; advanced materials and in-space manufacturing (making products in the low-gravity conditions of orbit, where certain materials can be produced with properties impossible to achieve on the ground); agri-food; and space resources for construction. Irish companies working in any of these areas and using space-derived data, technology or services are eligible to respond. A recording of ESA's webinar covering the process is available on the BSGN portal.

Deadline: 10 July 2026.

ESA Future PNT ITT - closes 7 August

ESA's Future Navigation department has issued an Invitation to Tender for in-orbit demonstrators in next-generation positioning, navigation and timing. The call has two technical priorities: quantum sensor technologies (using the quantum properties of atoms to measure position and time with far greater precision than current satellite systems) and machine learning for automation of navigation systems. Open to companies from ESA member states, Ireland included.

Deadline: 7 August 2026. → navisp.esa.int

PICTURE: Amazon Leo, the broadband satellite network Amazon is building in low Earth orbit, is planned to reach around 3,200 satellites when complete — a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink, which now has close to 11,000 in orbit. About 400 Amazon Leo satellites have been launched to date across 15 missions, flown on three different rockets: Atlas V, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Arianespace's Ariane 6.

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

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