The laser terminals that will connect the U.S. military’s next-generation satellite constellation are built in Munich. The company that builds them was acquired by Rocket Lab in April for $155 million.
Lubos Fedora is the Senior Sales and Business Development Manager at Mynaric, overseeing commercial customers and programs across EMEA and APAC. Based in Germany, he develops tailored solutions for existing customers while driving new business opportunities. Before joining Mynaric, Fedora worked at Honeywell Aerospace and Airinmar in the United Kingdom. He holds a Master of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Manchester.
Mynaric’s CONDOR Mk3 optical communication terminals sit at the center of the U.S. Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. Rocket Lab holds $1.3 billion in SDA contracts for 36 satellites across Tranche 2 Transport Layer and Tranche 3 Tracking Layer, and Mynaric supplies the laser links. Beyond Rocket Lab’s own constellation, Mynaric provides terminals to other SDA contractors including Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems. In March 2026, Mynaric secured an ESA HydRON Element 3 contract for the High Throughput Optical Network’s user segment, extending the company’s footprint into European institutional programs.
The acquisition itself was a case study in European space sovereignty debates. SatNews tracked the story from the initial Rheinmetall counter-bid through Rheinmetall’s withdrawal and the final German FDI approval in March 2026. The editorial question SatNews posed was direct: with over 90 percent of Mynaric’s backlog funded by U.S. Department of Defense contracts, was the company ever a sovereign German asset in any operational sense?
At SmallSat Europe, Fedora joins the panel “The Optical Mesh: Achieving Interoperability with ESTOL and SDA Requirements.” The session addresses how optical communication standards must converge across European and U.S. defense architectures to enable interoperable mesh networks at scale.
The terminals work. The interoperability standard is where Europe’s role in the optical mesh gets defined.
