Open Cosmos closed more than €170 million in contracts last year. The company that started as a platform-as-a-service satellite builder in Harwell is now bidding to build Europe’s sovereign telecom constellation.
Jordi Barrera Ars is the CTO of Open Cosmos, the UK-headquartered company that designs, builds, and operates satellite missions as an end-to-end service. He has more than a decade of hands-on experience across mechanical, structural, propulsion, thermal, and systems engineering for smallsats, combined with the programmatic management that scaling production demands. The dual expertise matters: Open Cosmos doesn’t just manufacture satellites for customers. It operates them, delivering data as a service from orbit.
The company’s contract book tells a scaling story. In August 2025, Open Cosmos kicked off the first rideshare mission for the European Commission’s In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation program, a framework designed to validate new space technologies in orbit. SatNews reported in October 2025 on the completion of the MANTIS mission, a two-year Earth observation program that set new benchmarks for sustainable space operations. In 2026, the company won the contract to build the Spanish Atlantic Constellation for the Spanish Space Agency and ESA, the largest Earth observation constellation ever contracted in Spain. Open Cosmos is also subcontractor and platform provider on the £5.15 million Orpheus mission for the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, partnering with Astroscale to enhance space situational awareness.
The ambitions extend beyond observation. Open Cosmos is raising approximately $200 million to build a Ka-band telecommunications constellation, positioning itself as a European provider in the sovereign connectivity market. The company also contracted to manufacture Europe’s first open 6G research lab in low Earth orbit for i2CAT, the Catalan research foundation. With teams across the UK, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the operational footprint matches the geographic spread of its government customers.
At SmallSat Europe, Barrera Ars joins the panel “The Flexible Factory: Mastering High-Mix, Serial Production for Diverse Manifests” alongside AAC Clyde Space CEO Luis Gomes, Aerospacelab’s Pierre Wilhelm, EnduroSat’s Simon van den Dries, and Tyvak International’s Dr. Marco Villa. The lineup spans the European smallsat manufacturing landscape from vertically integrated builders to platform-as-a-service providers.
Open Cosmos started by making satellites accessible. The question now is whether platform-as-a-service can scale to sovereign infrastructure.
