IRIS² will put roughly 290 satellites into orbit across LEO and MEO. Before any of them carry a classified byte, Europe needs a secure waveform that works across both. Koen Willems leads the program building it.
Willems is Vice President of EU/NATO Programs and Government Relations at ST Engineering iDirect Europe — the Belgian satcom equipment company headquartered in Sint-Niklaas, formerly Newtec before its 2019 acquisition by Singapore-based ST Engineering. He holds master’s degrees in English and Scandinavian Languages from Ghent University and in marketing strategy from Vlekho Business School in Brussels. He later completed three defense credentials: “High Studies in Security and Defence” at the Belgian Royal Higher Institute for Defence, the European Session for Armament Officials (SERA) at the French National Institute of Higher Defence in Paris, and the European Advanced Strategy Course at the Egmont Institute. The credentials track a career that moved from technology sales into the European defense-industrial machinery.
The European Protected Waveform is a €65 million European Defence Fund project across two phases. ST Engineering iDirect Europe leads a consortium of 22 organizations from 12 EU member states, under the authority of Belgium’s Ministry of Defence. Phase 1 allocated €30 million to establish the architecture. Phase 2, launched in May 2025 with €35 million in EDF funding, is prototyping and integrating the system. On November 26–27, 2025, the consortium completed over-the-air testing at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, demonstrating the waveform’s resistance to jamming and cyberattacks across GEO and LEO orbits — validating the EPW for use beyond IRIS² as a general European protected standard.
The EPW secures IRIS², the EU’s €10.6 billion sovereign connectivity constellation and Europe’s third space flagship after Galileo and Copernicus. The SpaceRISE consortium — Eutelsat, SES, and Hispasat — holds a 12-year concession to build and operate the system, with full governmental services expected by 2030. For readers tracking the defense economics reshaping the European smallsat market, the EPW is where policy becomes hardware: a waveform standard every terminal and ground station in the IRIS² ecosystem will need to speak.
The company’s defense-industrial footprint extends past waveforms. In February 2026, Raytheon selected ST Engineering iDirect’s manufacturing plant in Erpe-Mere, Belgium, for NATO’s ESSM Block II missile program. In March 2026, the company won a Satcoms Innovation Group (SIG) Cooperation of the Year Award with G&S SatCom for unified network and service management built on Intuition, its cloud-native multi-orbit ground system. SatNews has also covered the company’s joint SATCOM demonstration lab with Black Cat Systems for the Australian Defence Force.
At SmallSat Europe, Willems joins “The IRIS² Ground Game: Developing Universal Antennas for Multi-Orbit Operations” alongside Guillermo Salgado Gispert of ESA, who leads the agency’s IRIS² Secure Connectivity Programme; Ahsun Murad, president and CEO of Optimal Satcom; and Guy de Carufel, founder and CEO of Cognitive Space.
Europe has the constellation design and the concession contract. Willems is building the signal that makes it sovereign.
