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The Space Industry by satsearch - sharing stories about the businesses taking us into orbit.
We delve into the opinions and expertise of the people behind the commercial space companies of today, who could become the household names of tomorrow. Find out more about the companies and technologies discussed on this show at satsearch.com.
Intro
Hi and welcome to the Space Industry podcast by satsearch. My name is Narayan, COO at satsearch, and I'll be your host as we journey through the space industry.
The space sector is going through some seismic changes, promising to generate significant impact for life on Earth and enable humans to sustain life elsewhere in the cosmos. At satsearch, we work with buyers and suppliers across the global marketplace, helping to accelerate missions through our online platform.
Based on our day to day work supporting commercial activity, my aim here during this podcast is to shed light on the boots on the ground developments across the globe that are helping foster and drive technical and commercial innovation.
So come join me, as we delve into a fascinating, challenging, and ultimately inspiring sector.
0:49: Today we're going to be talking to Alén Space, a Spanish CubeSat manufacturer who provides cutting edge technology and manufacturing of small satellites and services for development of end-to-end missions.
We have with us Isolina Pérez Donnelly, who is the Sales Director at Alén Space, who is going to be talking to us about the trends in the NewSpace market when it comes to nanosatellites.
We're gonna be discussing about how the NewSpace market is evolving and how the markets are moving ahead. Isolina, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Welcome to the Space Industry podcast.
1:27: Thank you. Thank you to satsearch for inviting us. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.
1:33: I know that Alén Space has a pretty long history dating back to perhaps 2008 when the University of Vigo was starting the nanosatellite program. Given that your team has had almost 20 years now of experience dealing with nanosatellites, I'm sure that this is going to be a very insightful conversation between you and I. I quickly wanted to give the audience a chance to maybe get an introduction to Alén Space and what you have achieved back from 2008 to now in 2025.
2:05: Yeah, sure, yes, as you said, although the company was founded in 2019, the core team, they had been working together since more or less 2008. I think a remarkable milestone was 2012, when the team participated in the launch of the first Spanish nanosatellite, Xatcobeo, so we, we definitely have a strong heritage in small satellite missions and also in communication subsystems.
In this sense, Alén Space, we have a double role in the supply chain in the ecosystem. On one hand, we provide turnkey solutions for small satellites, and on the other hand, we have a solid portfolio of communication subsystems. Among them, we have Software Defined Radios, onboard computers, TT&C solutions, communication payloads for different range of applications such as AIS and BDS, maritime communication standards, ADS-B for airplane tracking, spectrum monitoring, we have quite a variety of communication payloads. Also ground stations, onboard software for satellites, and we had our own mission control software.
Because of this heritage from the years with the university, Alén Space since very early days, we started by commercializing our products. We did not spend years showing demos or working on developments, I would say very, from almost day one, we started by selling our hardware to universities, to private companies, and this has been a key to our growth and, allow me to say, to our success and to consolidate, and to allow us to improve also our products.
Regarding the missions, we started in 2021, we launched our first satellite as Alén Space for the University of Brasilia for their Alpha Crux mission and since then we have been working on several missions. In 2024, last year in August, we launched four satellites for our customer Sateliot, for their IoT narrowband constellation. It was recently published a few weeks ago that we are now working on the five new satellites, to add to their constellation.
We have many interesting missions going on right now. Last year we were awarded with a contract from DLR for their CubeISL mission, which is a very interesting project for us. The aim of the mission is to perform Inter-Satellite Links with the optical payload developed by them. Through these missions and always our aim has been to deliver to our customers. We are proud to say that up until now, we, all of our missions have been successful, so we have that added value of 100% of mission success. And this has allowed us to grow, to learn and to mature our capabilities.
5:50: That's terrific. We know that the CubeSat market is also evolving very quickly. I don't recall any more, not many 1U CubeSats being built in today's world, what was probably 10 or 15 years ago very popular. I want to get a sense of how have you seen the market evolve, also because we can talk of two ways here.
So one is the applications. So for example, if you take something like Earth Observation. Obviously, satellite platforms are evolving there to having higher apertures, higher resolutions, and therefore higher size of platforms moving towards microsatellites.
You are an expert in communication, so there may be a different story there. Well, let's talk about the application side of it, and then also the platform side of it, which is how have the capabilities in the platforms evolved itself.
So if you can briefly touch upon both of these, it would be really nice.
6:46: Yeah, for sure, in the 6 years that we have been in the market as Alén Space, we have seen a huge evolution. We ourselves, we were born as a NewSpace company and I think that label is right now perhaps outdated.
So over the time, we have grown in a very dynamic environment, private companies leading commercial initiatives and building their business models based on or based around a satellite infrastructure and we have seen huge constellation projects come up and changing completely the scale.
You mentioned applications, we have Earth observation, communication. I think the difference is that it's not about launching technology for the sake of it anymore. And it's about delivering from space services that improve life here on Earth. And this is just as relevant for people inside the space industry as it is for the general public.
This shift has changed the industry structure. We see some companies that they are trying to own more of the supply chain. They are moving toward a vertical integration to provide the services and also not just focus on upstream but on downstream. There are obvious advantages here for sure, not relying on third parties for critical technology, but it's always a trade-off.
So it's not no longer IODs, it's no longer to prove technologies. The payloads have to deliver, they have higher requirements and this is also changing the requirements of the platform, in terms of power requirements of pointing accuracy. I think Earth observation has always been a demand. Now we need to provide more robust and resilient solutions.
Also, because in the past years, as I said, the initiatives have been led by private companies. This has put the space sector under pressure to adapt to the timelines and costs that we see in other more mature industries. Perhaps from the outside, the space company still see special just because of what we do, launching stuff into orbit, but we also have to be competitive, efficient and scalable.
So there is a lot of experiences and best practices transferable from other sectors, and this is important to have in mind.
9:30: We know that a lot of the CubeSat manufacturers are also moving up in size. We see that maybe over 50% of the really high heritage CubeSat manufacturers are also moving up in size because of the demand in the industry.
What is your view on this, and do you see also Alén taking this path, or do you see that you want to focus still only on the nanosatellite segment and then increase the performance of the platforms there, or do you see a natural evolution for you also then to be building bigger platforms?
10:04: We will grow, we will adapt, we will offer added-value in our platforms, in order to comply with the requirements, with the needs of our customers and of the market. Always eyes on the markets.
As you say, we see that it seems everyone is growing bigger, everyone is growing, but we will grow, we will mature, we will adapt our platforms. To offer added value, not growing in size for the sake of growing.
10:40: When you talk about the capabilities Alén has built, for me, it is a unique team because I don't recollect any team in the industry that has in-house capabilities and communications payloads and satellite platforms coming together in one place. Obviously, with that, you are probably ideally positioned to provide service to a constellation operator who is especially focused on communications perhaps. I know. You have the AIS, ADS-B, IoT and other kinds of payloads out there.
Is this a natural evolution because of the team having the RF capabilities in-house, or was this because of the customers then concentrating towards communication capabilities for you?
11:21: I think it was a combination of both the founders, the core team that founded Alén Space, they come specifically from the faculty of Telecommunication Engineering. So we have a huge heritage in the communications area, also combined with space, small satellite missions, and also software capabilities, which is not so often talked about or known by the ecosystem, but we have developed solid capabilities in our onboard software solutions and also in the mission control software.
And I think we will continue to combine these two areas on, providing turnkey solutions, and communication payloads and communication systems, RF systems.
12:20: When you are now maturing towards also supporting constellations, you briefly talked about maybe improving pointing accuracy, improving the ways in which you can assure service as such. How is it different for a company like you which is maybe initially doing individual satellite missions for individual customers, to now saying that you're doing actually multiple satellites for one customer, and you have to have a certain flight dynamic system probably to assure there is a certain service area coverage at a certain time, and so on.
Can you walk us through how is this evolution happening in companies like yours, as you're maturing towards providing constellations?
13:02: Moving from one-shot projects towards scalable solutions, I believe it's not a challenge just for Alén space. I believe it's a reality for all satellite integrators or satellite manufacturers. It's a challenge that comes from adapting to the incredible growth of the market.
We, at Alén Space, during these years and through the projects we are working on. We have pre-designed integrated platforms, but also, as I was mentioning before, our added-value is to adapt our platforms to the requirements of each project, because even if we are speaking about multiple platforms or constellation batches, a batch of satellites, they can vary from mission to mission. A I think we are competitive in this sense, adapting to the requirements of our customers.
14:07: And from a customer standpoint, what do you see the market evolution like? You have a healthy mix of customers who are asking you for technology demonstration. For example, you mentioned about the DLR mission, and you also mentioned about the customer you're working with for the constellation for IOT for example.
What is the split like that you see in the current market situation? Do you think? There is enough technology to be demonstrated that we'll keep feeding you and pushing the edge of what is capable in platforms, while you also make this. What is your perspective on this?
14:41: What we are seeing is a strong wave of public initiatives from governments that are focusing on building sovereign capabilities to reduce critical dependencies on third parties, and given the current geopolitical landscape, defense has become a top priority again. I recently heard in a conference that the lines between civil and defense are blurring, so now it's more accurate to talk about civil, commercial, and defense combined.
Also, for the industry, sustainability is no longer just a regulatory checkbox, it's becoming a clear competitive advantage. And companies can demonstrate responsible and sustainable space operations, and this will earn trust and stand out in the market.
15:44: Yeah, absolutely. I agree to, to all of this as a trend line as such. Moving on with these trends that are out there, you mentioned clearly that sovereign demand is picking up. And we also see that quite a lot. We see obviously users from various parts of the world coming to us and requesting different products and services through our platform. And we can see how sovereign demand is moving there as well.
One of the aspects of sovereign demand is also sovereign based on manufacturing and support, that comes with it. So you can see this now also with some of the trends that are happening in the industry where companies who are starting maybe in Europe are sometimes forced to also start operations in the US or Middle East or wherever at that point of time, to be able to comply with the local requirements, to be able to then get contracts locally that are then done and executed by local teams in there.
Do you see this also as a trend and if you do see it, is this in the roadmap for Alén, or how do you see this sovereign market evolution and evolution of Alén itself in that?
16:48: I think in this sense we have to speak about Alén space being part of the Spanish ecosystem and of the European ecosystem and in this sense, I think the space agencies and they have also the role to, to coordinate, to understand the capacities and the demands of the different companies in the ecosystem.
It doesn't make sense also to replicate capacities, and we have to identify which, which points we need to develop at, from a national point of view. And that could be a problem for some certain type of customers. But I also, I believe that it, it doesn't make sense to have double capacities.
So we need to think first as Alén Space as part of the Spanish ecosystem, and then as Europe. And how does Europe, Spain, first Spain and then Europe want to be competitive.
17:53: I also wanted to briefly touch base on quality. I know that you guys have also implemented higher quality standards than the normal CubeSat team for coming out of university, then becoming a startup as such. One of the issues that also has come through in the industry is there was a significant amount of nanosatellites that failed on entering orbit. The percentage was sometimes as high as 30-40%, almost dead on arrival or not even getting into service after a month of launching.
What is your experience in building quality systems, reliability processes that are out there, that assures that these satellites actually function?
18:34: For Alén Space, quality is a core value on how we work, especially perhaps for commercial customers that perhaps has been in general a trade-off between cost and timeline of the project, but for us it's always test.
I remember I once heard Fernando Aguado saying it's not "plug and play", it's "plug and pray". So you have to ensure the manufacturing procedures, the testing procedures to reduce any risk, and it always comes as a trade-off between, of course, being competitive in price and offering efficient timelines to adapt to the needs of our customers.
19:26: There are a lot of ways in which people are adapting to demand in terms of scale. So for example, there are two approaches that I can think of.
One is companies who say that I expect demand and I'm going to build a satellite factory that will be able to produce whatever 100, 200 satellites a year. And then you cross your fingers and say, OK, I hope that I have this customer coming up and you bet your entire capital and resources to that. And then you hope that because you're betting and the market meets you there and that you're in a position to then deliver like nobody else will.
Or there is the approach that you have to scale according to what customers bring in, and maybe that is gonna be a little harder on customers as well because they probably need to wait a little longer or maybe they have to pay a little bit more because it's not already built to scale.
What is your approach?
20:17: For Alén Space, it has been the second option. We have grown with our customers. Personally, it's very risky to build big facilities and then cross your fingers as you very well said and hope that there is enough orders and enough projects coming in. I will repeat what I said before, I think eyes on the markets and that the growth has to come with a project behind.
20:44: Any final thoughts on what is next for Alén Space or what is your prediction for the market in the next 3 to 5 years?
20:53: I think we are going to see a lot more of public initiatives. Defense as a priority, also sustainability, traffic management, space debris mitigation as businesses of their own.
I think we are going to see a trend of companies moving beyond low Earth to different orbits and exploring different business models. Things to take in mind when we look towards the future, agility is essential, but always keep in mind and be resilient with your long-term objectives.
21:40: And for anybody who is interested out there, all the Alén Space capabilities, including the subsystems, communication payloads, platforms, all of them are available on the satsearch supplier hub.
I'm sure that anybody who's interested more can reach out to you on LinkedIn to connect and maybe have a conversation further on this.
Thank you so much for taking the time today, Isolina, for having this conversation and wish you the best.
22:02: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Outro
22:07: Thanks for joining me today for another exciting story from the space industry. If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, please feel free to write to me at info@satsearch.com.
And if you're looking to either speed up your space mission development or showcase your capabilities to a global audience, check out our marketplace at satsearch.com.
In the meantime, go daringly into the cosmos, till the next time we meet.