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OHB Italia ships two 25-kilogram IRIDE microsatellites a month, comfortably, a deliberate departure from its five-year institutional-tier work. Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was when European production rates moved from claim to public number, and the supplier tier underneath has to match.
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A former AMD VP and an Oxford economist put the megawatt orbital data center thesis through physics and capital-allocation math at SmallSat Europe 2026.
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Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was the day Earth observation's competitive frontier moved off the sensor and onto the tasking and integration layer.
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AI shipped to production in European space on Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026. Ubotica's Aubrey Dunne walked through a deployed maritime ISR use case. Cognitive Space, Telespazio, and Spaceflux put the trust problem on the table. The next procurement question is auditability, not capability. The European vendor that builds the audit layer around the model wins the defence contract.
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Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026 was when European space publicly accepted that contested orbit is a 2026 operating condition, not a 2030 scenario. Donati put the doctrine pivot in a single line. Rotteveel put replenishment velocity on the table as the new constellation-design metric. Tillier framed SatCen interoperability as the work of the next two years.
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The honest summary of Day 1 of SmallSat Europe 2026: the capital is in, the technology exists, the talent is available, and none of it works without procurement reform. The procurement architecture is the lever that decides whether the capital pivot builds an ecosystem or simply reinforces the incumbent prime base.
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A single shutoff order in 2025 ended a decade-long debate. Single-source dependency is the strategic risk Europe is now organizing around — and "dual-use" is no longer the operative category. The replacement frame is technological sovereignty. The harder problem: Europe is using the same word for four different things.
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For a decade, European space had one problem: not enough money. By the end of Day 1 of SmallSat Europe 2026, that problem was gone — and a sharper one had replaced it. Europe has the budget. The supply chain is the bottleneck. The next 18 months decide which side of the gap European defense space lands on.
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Open Cosmos closed more than €170 million in contracts last year. CTO Jordi Barrera Ars brings the platform-as-a-service manufacturing model to SmallSat Europe's Flexible Factory panel.
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PLD Space has raised €210 million in 2026, anchored by Europe's largest equity round for a launch company and an EIB venture debt facility. With MIURA 5 approaching its maiden orbital flight from French Guiana later this year, the Elche-based company sits at the center of Europe's push for sovereign access to space. Sales Manager Daniele Dallari joins the defense-stage panel at SmallSat Europe.
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