IRIS²

And we've got another story directly related to that coming up next.

Um, the Belgian satellite maker Aerospace Lab has won a contract worth 2.4 billion euros to build satellites for a project called either Iris² or Iris squared.

I'm gonna say Iris squared, 'cause they do do it as a little caret.

Um, Iris² is a European initiative to develop satellite communications that work for European governments, European defense and security agencies, and European citizens.

Uh, it's a satellite network that is, quote, "immune to foreign interference, resilient against disruption, and accountable to European institutions and citizens," end quote.

In other words, not exposed to the whims of an erratic billionaire or an increasingly antagonistic US administration.

Astronomers track thousands of them.

Aerospace lab, Thales Alenia Space secure $5.4 billion in Iris2 contracts.

Aerospace lab and Thales Alenia Space have secured Iris2 contracts expected to total more than $5.4 billion, covering satellite platforms and communications payloads for the European Union's secure communications constellation.

Quick solar update.

The sun is quite active with numerous sunspot groups visible.

And in that way, we have a lot of innovation.

We have Iris Square, which is the direct concurrent of Starlink because it is about telecommunication.

It will be the first post-cantum cryptography constellation around the world.

It will be very good for secure connectivity for broadband internet and it will be an initiative coming from Europe with low or by satellite, with medium and geo.

$700 million is a pretty sizable contract, and that can certainly help to bridge a lot of gaps that Blue Origin might be experiencing as they try to get New Glenn back up and as they try to repurpose Blue Ring for the Martian mission.

For an even bigger communications contract, we have OHB winning nearly 1 billion euros for the Iris Squared constellation.

So this is for the development and production of 18 satellite platforms.

So more than the one that Blue Orchid has to make.

satellites that Blue Ring would fall into the class of.

This is interesting on a few levels.

I mean, we've talked about Iris Squared quite a bit recently, mostly around the funding that's going into it from countries like Poland and Spain.

And we have some clarity on what exactly this constellation will look like.

And I have a third German space story.

The German Aerospace Established Company, OHB, has now been awarded... a $1.16 billion contract to build 18 IRIS-2 satellites.

IRIS-2 is the European Space Agency's, the European Union's answer to Starlink.

They want to have their own Starlink, sovereign control, but they're having the government build it.

So it's going to cost a fortune.

The technology involved, of course, means that there are long timelines, uh, for developing these and for deploying them in space.

But there are remarkably quite a few areas where Europe is moving rather quickly, especially on the Iris² satellite constellation, which is growing quite quickly and, in some cases, even ahead of schedule.

There is a lot of energy in European national capitals, but also multinational institutions in Europe, like the European Union and the European Space Agency, that are committing vast sums to bolstering European military space capability and dual-use, uh, space capabilities.

In the report, we did a bit of a survey of the, the main investments and came up with a figure of, uh, about $109 billion that is being invested in military space capability at the moment, which is a pretty serious, uh, sum.

And at the moment, the, the Europeans have not done a lot of thinking about what kind of ground segments they need to, uh, invest in because up until this point, most of those decisions and most of that kind of capability has been provided by the United States.

Then there's the really tricky question of institutional arrangements in Europe.

On the one hand, it is a little bit easier for European countries to work together bilaterally through partnerships between European firms to build, uh, space capabilities like satellites, or even to have things like Iris squared being sponsored by the European Union.

The question is whether Europe will be able to create a, a space command or some unified way of operating its space capabilities so that the whole is greater than the sum of its individual national parts.