In January 2026, Poland’s space sector reported its first profitable year, driven by a surge in national defense procurement and a tenfold increase in contributions to the European Space Agency. For a country that only stood up its national space agency in 2014, the jump from observer to investor carries weight — and the officer tasked with steering the defense and dual-use side of that growth is Col. Marcin Mazur, Vice-President of the Polish Space Agency (POLSA).
Mazur’s route to the agency ran through military intelligence, not venture capital. Commissioned in 1998, he graduated from Warsaw’s Military University of Technology with a master’s in topography and mapping, then spent more than two decades moving between geospatial and imagery intelligence roles: a mobile geospatial support team leader for NATO Response Forces, a posting at Joint Force Command Brunssum in the Netherlands, and eventually head of the Imagery Intelligence Branch inside the P2 Intelligence Division of the Polish General Staff. In that role he co-chaired the Polish-Italian working group for the COSMO-SkyMed and OPTSAT-3000 satellite programs and chaired the inter-ministerial Earth Observation Task Group. He joined POLSA as Vice-President in 2021.
His remit is the intersection where most European space strategy actually gets decided: dual-use capability. Mazur’s portfolio covers Earth observation, satellite communications, space situational awareness and space surveillance and tracking, and launching technologies — the same four pillars that show up in nearly every NATO and EU space policy document. His stated goal is to execute the Polish Space Strategy issued in 2017 while keeping it aligned with the NATO Overarching Space Policy of 2019 and the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence of 2023.
The Polish industrial base has moved in step. Creotech Instruments signed a €52 million contract with ESA for the CAMILA constellation in April 2025 — the largest ESA contract ever awarded to a Polish company. Warsaw-based PIAP Space launched an in-orbit refueling technology project that same year. And Creotech’s EagleEye, at the time the largest Polish satellite ever launched, reached orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission in August 2024.
At SmallSat Europe, Mazur takes the stage in a session format the program uses sparingly: a one-on-one interview. “Interview with the VP of the Polish Space Agency” pairs him with SatNews contributor Bruno Riegl for a conversation about how a mid-sized European space power is translating policy documents into procurements, industrial capacity, and orbital hardware. The format trades panel cross-talk for depth — a single operator explaining how the pieces fit together.
Europe’s smallsat sector has no shortage of launch providers, manufacturers, and service companies making the case for their own technology. What it has fewer of are the procurement officials who decide which of those cases become contracts. Mazur is one of them, and for 30 minutes he is the only one in the room.
