> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.satelliteinsights.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # IRIS² Finally Cut Checks, and the Biggest One Landed on the Ground - URL: https://www.satelliteinsights.com/iris2-first-contracts-deep-dive/ - Published: 2026-09-08T13:00:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-30T15:05:23.000Z - Description: The first IRIS² industrial contracts are signed: OHB's €1B for 18 MEO platforms, HispaSat's €1.6B ground segment. Who gets paid, and what the order reveals. - Author: Glenn Canales - Tags: Sovereignty, Deep Dive, #html-card, #start-here In this analysis [01The month the money moved](#s-money)[02The €1.6 billion on the ground](#s-ground)[03A bus is not a satellite](#s-bus)[04SES’s €1.35 billion bet](#s-bet)[05Where I come out](#s-verdict) Disclosure The author has no position in the securities of any company discussed here and no commercial engagement with any of them. Viasat, a former employer, is not discussed in this piece. Analysis · Sovereign Connectivity Free to read ## IRIS² Finally Cut Checks, and the Biggest One Landed on the Ground. Twenty months after signature, Europe’s secure constellation placed its first industrial orders: nearly €1 billion to OHB for eighteen satellite platforms, and a ground segment prime contract exceeding €1.6 billion to HispaSat. The workshare tells you more about this program than the satellite count does. **Glenn Canales** · Satellite Insights · 8 September 2026 · 9 min read €1.6B+ Budget for the IRIS² ground segment under HispaSat as prime contractor, the largest single disclosed line item in the program to date, per Indra Group, 7 August 2026 \~€1B OHB contract to develop and produce eighteen medium Earth orbit satellite platforms, announced 31 August 2026 €1.35B Maximum investment SES has committed to the MEO layer, with roughly 90 percent of that capacity retained for commercial sale €15.6B Total planned program investment after the August 2026 revision, up from roughly €10.6 billion at the December 2024 signing 01 · The month the money moved Between 6 August and 31 August, the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) program did something it had not done in twenty months of existence: it placed industrial orders. On 6 August the European Commission, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the SpaceRISE consortium of Eutelsat, HispaSat, and SES closed the first program milestone and opened the implementation phase. The next day, Indra Group announced that HispaSat, the satellite operator in which it holds an 89.68 percent stake, had been named prime contractor for the constellation’s entire ground segment, with a budget the company puts above €1.6 billion. Three weeks later, on 31 August, SES handed the satellite manufacturer once known as Otto Hydraulik Bremen (OHB) a contract worth nearly €1 billion to develop and produce eighteen satellite platforms for the medium Earth orbit (MEO) layer. The program these contracts serve is larger than the one Europe signed in December 2024\. The European Commission now puts total investment above €15.6 billion and the constellation at 348 satellites, 330 in low Earth orbit (LEO) and 18 in MEO. HispaSat’s own release counts 342, a discrepancy neither operator has reconciled, though the signed OHB contract for eighteen MEO platforms points to the higher figure. I covered the cost escalation and the politics of the August signing in [the 11 August Deep Dive](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/iris2-rendezvous-1-europe-signed-anyway/). This one follows the checks and what their destinations reveal. ## What did the first IRIS² contracts actually buy? **Three things, and none of them is a finished satellite.**OHB will develop and produce eighteen platforms, the buses, for the MEO layer, in a contract worth nearly €1 billion. SES designs and builds the payloads for those same satellites in-house in Luxembourg. And HispaSat becomes prime contractor for the ground segment of the entire constellation, covering antenna infrastructure, control systems, and connections to terrestrial networks, with a budget exceeding €1.6 billion. The ground segment award is the largest single disclosed line item in the program so far, which is the fact this analysis is built on. What follows works through where that €1.6 billion goes and why it landed on an operator rather than the usual ground incumbents, what OHB’s platform contract includes and what it deliberately leaves out, the commercial bet SES is making with up to €1.35 billion of its own money, and where I come out on a program that has finally started converting political commitment into a supply chain. Open to everyone ## The remaining four sections are now open to everyone. This analysis went to subscribers first on 8 September and is now public. New analysis reaches subscribers the week it publishes, and an email address is all it takes. - 02The €1.6 billion on the ground - 03A bus is not a satellite - 04SES’s €1.35 billion bet - 05Where I come out [Sign up free for new analysis](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/#/portal/signup) Independent weekly intelligence on the satellite communications sector. Unsubscribe in one click. In this analysis [01The month the money moved](#s-money)[02The €1.6 billion on the ground](#s-ground)[03A bus is not a satellite](#s-bus)[04SES’s €1.35 billion bet](#s-bet)[05Where I come out](#s-verdict) Sources - OHB press release on the IRIS² MEO platform contract, 31 Aug 2026 (contract value and platform specifications, company-stated) - Indra Group press release and notification to the Spanish National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), 7 Aug 2026 (ground segment award, budget, ownership stake) - HispaSat press release on the IRIS² ground segment and Low LEO layer, 7 Aug 2026 - Reuters, report on HispaSat’s IRIS² ground segment award, 7 Aug 2026 - SES press release on its next-generation MEO strategy following Rendez-vous 1, Aug 2026 - SES H1 2026 results release and earnings call, 30 Jul 2026 - European Commission statement on the revised IRIS² development and deployment plan, Aug 2026 - Via Satellite reporting on the OHB award and SpaceRISE milestone, 31 Aug–3 Sep 2026 Disclosure The author has no position in the securities of any company discussed here and no commercial engagement with any of them. Viasat, a former employer, is not discussed in this piece. **Unlocked.** You are reading the full analysis, sections 02 through 05. 02 · The €1.6 billion on the ground ## Why did the biggest check land on the ground segment? Start with what the money covers before asking why it went where it did. Under the agreement announced 7 August, HispaSat, operating under the Indra Space umbrella, is prime contractor for the antenna infrastructure, the control systems, and the connections to terrestrial networks for every orbital layer of the constellation, distributed across multiple sites and built to the security and resilience requirements of a government program. Indra describes it as the largest and most complex system developed to date in Europe for a space program, which is a company characterization, though for once the scope supports the adjectives. The award also makes HispaSat the first Spanish company to hold a leading role in a major European space project, a fact the Spanish government reinforced with a separate Special Modernization Program of up to €2 billion for national satellite capabilities. The interesting part is who did not get it. Europe has ground segment specialists and teleport operators who have spent decades building exactly this kind of infrastructure for commercial fleets. The prime went instead to a satellite operator majority-owned by a defense electronics group, and the choice fits a pattern I wrote about when [Poland bought a gateway rather than just satellites](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/poland-bought-a-gateway-not-just-satellites-deep-dive/): sovereign programs treat the ground segment as the control point, and control points go to entities the sponsoring governments can direct. For readers who price ground infrastructure for a living, €1.6 billion across the full constellation, spread over multiple secured sites and every orbital layer, is a number that will set reference expectations for sovereign ground work well beyond this program. HispaSat also takes the lead on the system’s very low Earth orbit layer, operating below 750 kilometers and aimed at direct-to-device and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity, and has committed up to €600 million of its own to secure access to non-geostationary capacity. That commitment is company-stated and forward-looking, and the Low LEO layer itself remains a design, with nothing demonstrated in orbit. 03 · A bus is not a satellite ## What does OHB’s €1 billion actually cover? The OHB contract, announced 31 August and valued by the company at nearly €1 billion, covers the development and production of eighteen MEO satellite platforms with roughly 15 kilowatts of power and a launch mass around 2.6 tonnes. Platform, here, means the bus: structure, power, propulsion, thermal, the parts that keep a spacecraft alive. The communications payload, the part that earns revenue and defines what the service can do, SES designs and builds in-house in Luxembourg. OHB’s chief executive Marco Fuchs called the award a step in “further expanding our role in Europe’s strategic space infrastructure,” and for OHB that is exactly what it is: series production scale on a program with political staying power. For SES the split reads differently. An operator that keeps the payload keeps the layer where service economics are decided, and hands out the layer that is closest to commodity manufacturing. Thales Alenia Space sits in the IRIS² core industrial team, but the MEO payload is not theirs, and that allocation is the clearest signal in the whole workshare about who intends to own the customer relationship. SES has operated commercial MEO since it took control of O3b, so the payload competence claim has history behind it, though eighteen new-generation satellites is a different scale of in-house build than the company has attempted before. Every performance figure attached to these spacecraft is a design figure. First launches are planned for 2029 and service entry for 2030, and nothing about this layer has been demonstrated. 04 · SES’s €1.35 billion bet ## How does a commercial operator underwrite a sovereign program? The funding structure explains the enthusiasm. Public money from the European Commission and ESA covers roughly €11.6 billion of the €15.6 billion total, with the three SpaceRISE operators contributing up to €4 billion between them. SES’s disclosed share is a commitment of up to €1.35 billion to the MEO layer, in exchange for which it will be able to sell approximately 90 percent of that layer’s capacity commercially. Strip the program branding away and SES is getting a substantially subsidized refresh of its MEO fleet, with payload control and most of the sellable capacity, for about a third of what eighteen high-power MEO satellites and their ground infrastructure would plausibly cost on a private balance sheet. Would SES have ordered eighteen new MEO satellites on its own account this year? Nothing in the first-half numbers says yes. H1 2026 revenue was €1.602 billion, up 72.4 percent as reported because the Intelsat acquisition is now consolidated, and down 5 percent like-for-like. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) came in at €725 million, and adjusted free cash flow was negative €130 million, all company-stated on 30 July. A balance sheet digesting Intelsat does not fund speculative constellation renewal, which is why the sovereign anchor matters: the European program converts a capital expenditure SES could not justify into one it cannot afford to skip. I made the general version of this argument in [the scale-versus-sovereignty Deep Dive](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/scale-vs-sovereignty-weekly-deep-dive/), and the MEO layer is the cleanest worked example yet. It also bears on [the multi-orbit question](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/the-multi-orbit-mirage-how-geo-operators-are-retiring-the-fleet-they-cant-fill/): a subsidized MEO refresh gives SES a latency tier between geostationary and LEO that its unsubsidized competitors have to price against. 05 · Where I come out ## What would have to be true for this workshare to work? Take the hurdles in the order a program manager will meet them. The schedule requires first launches in 2029 and service in 2030, on a program whose budget grew roughly 48 percent before any hardware was cut, and European flagship programs do not have a habit of hitting first-announced dates. The satellite count is still inconsistent between the European Commission’s 348 and HispaSat’s 342, and the total itself grew by 66 satellites in an August expansion the EU attributed to the changing security environment, so treat any count as a snapshot rather than a specification. And the ground segment, the piece with the biggest budget, is a multi-site, multi-layer integration job under government security requirements, which is precisely the kind of work where large space programs historically give back their margins and their schedules. Against that, three things changed in August that I did not expect to see this quickly. Real contracts were signed with real values attached, which ends the period when IRIS² was a signature in search of a supply chain. The workshare came out coherent: operators kept the payloads and the ground, the layers where service economics and control live, and manufacturers got the buses. And the largest disclosed check went to the ground segment, which is where I have argued the sovereign value actually sits. The bottom line is that IRIS² stopped being a promise and started being a procurement in August, and the shape of the procurement is more commercially rational than the program’s history gave anyone reason to expect. Whether Europe gets a working constellation by 2030 is a schedule question I would not underwrite. Whether it gets its money’s worth is a ground segment question, and that question now has a name on it: HispaSat. ### What I am watching next - OHB production milestones and any slippage language in its quarterly reporting, where an eighteen-unit series build will be visible early. - Ground segment site selections and host-country announcements, which will show whether security requirements or industrial-return politics are driving the map. - SES capital expenditure disclosure over the next two to three quarters, where the €1.35 billion commitment has to start appearing. - Whether Eutelsat’s share of the workshare, so far the quietest of the three operators, surfaces in the next round of awards. ## This analysis reached subscribers first. The next one goes out Tuesday. One free article every Tuesday on satellite operators, spectrum and the ground segment, plus the public preview of every Deep Dive. An email address is all it takes. Email address Sign up free Check your inbox for the link that confirms your signup. ## Paid members get every Deep Dive the day it publishes. Each Tuesday Deep Dive in full, the weekly Satellite Deal Tracker and the full archive, for $300 a year or $30 a month. [Upgrade to paid](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/#/portal/account/plans) **Satellite Insights Weekly** is independent research on the satellite communications sector, written by Glenn Canales, Principal of Satellite Insights LLC. Forty years in commercial and enterprise satcom, including running enterprise broadband services for a major satellite operator, leading enterprise sales at iDirect Technologies, and earlier roles at PanAmSat/Intelsat and Spacenet. **Disclosure.** The author has no position in the securities of any company discussed here and no commercial engagement with any of them. Viasat, a former employer, is not discussed in this piece. **Figures.** Contract values, budgets, and program totals are as disclosed by OHB, Indra Group, HispaSat, SES, and the European Commission on the dates given, and are labeled company-stated or regulator-confirmed accordingly. All performance and schedule figures for IRIS² are design targets, not demonstrated service metrics. Market-sensitive figures are excluded by standing policy. Nothing here is investment advice. Related reading: [IRIS² Got Bigger and 48 Percent More Expensive. Europe Signed Anyway.](https://www.satelliteinsights.com/iris2-rendezvous-1-europe-signed-anyway/)