In 2020, a Russian satellite maneuvered close enough to the Franco-Italian military communications spacecraft Athena-Fidus that France’s newly created Space Command treated it as an act of orbital intimidation. The officer who disclosed the incident publicly was Maj. Gen. Michel Friedling, then the first commander of France’s Commandement de l’Espace. That disclosure did more than embarrass Moscow: it forced a continent-wide conversation about whether Europe could actually see what was happening in its own orbital neighborhood.
Friedling spent three years building France’s military space surveillance architecture from scratch, standing up the Commandement de l’Espace in September 2019 and shaping France’s doctrine for contested space operations. He coordinated with U.S. Space Command closely enough to receive the Legion of Merit from Gen. James Dickinson in November 2022. When he retired, he carried with him a specific conviction: that Europe’s space domain awareness depended on commercial infrastructure, not just government radars.
He co-founded Look Up (originally Look Up Space) in Toulouse to act on that conviction. The company builds and operates a global network of ground-based radars paired with a software-as-a-service digital platform that tracks and characterizes objects in orbit. The model is commercial space situational awareness sold to governments, operators, and insurers: real-time surveillance delivered as a subscription rather than a sovereign capability each nation must build alone.
The business has attracted capital at a pace unusual for European space startups. Look Up closed a €14 million seed round backed by Karista and supported by the France 2030 investment plan, then raised €50 million in June 2025 through a combination of equity, bank debt, and public grants. In February 2026, the company signed a strategic partnership with Tahiti Nui Telecom to install two radars in French Polynesia, with the first scheduled to become operational in September 2026 and the second in March 2027. French Polynesia gives Look Up coverage across the Pacific, a geometry that complements the European sensor baseline and fills a gap that matters as much to defense planners as to constellation operators tracking their own assets.
At SmallSat Europe, Friedling is a standalone speaker on the program. His perspective intersects most directly with the conference’s threads on space sustainability, orbital services, and the growing imperative for European space domain awareness in an environment where 10,000-plus active satellites share orbits with cataloged debris and uncooperative objects.
The orbital environment does not get less congested. The question is whether Europe builds the commercial surveillance layer fast enough to know what is up there before something goes wrong.
