IRIS² Finally Cut Checks, and the Biggest One Landed on the Ground
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.
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.
€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
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. 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.
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- 02The €1.6 billion on the ground
- 03A bus is not a satellite
- 04SES’s €1.35 billion bet
- 05Where I come out
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