SPECIAL: Space leaders convene for NewSpace Capital's Annual Meeting
Leaders from the worlds of space technology and investment met at the headquarters of SES for the event.
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Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The View from Space.
🔸 Global leaders in space technology and investment met at the headquarters of SES in Luxembourg this month for the annual meeting of NewSpace Capital, the world’s leading growth-stage space-tech private equity firm. Opening the event, Executive Chairman Felix von Schubert spoke about the importance of the space sector and the investment opportunity that awaited investors:
‘Just a few days ago, it was reported that several Russian satellites had manoeuvred close to an ICEYE radar satellite used to support Ukraine. Whatever the intent, it was the latest reminder that space is not a distant or abstract domain. It’s infrastructure, it’s intelligence, it’s security. It matters. And that’s why today matters. …
Space today is the enabling network of modern life. It supports communications, navigation, climate monitoring, disaster response, financial risk analysis, energy, agriculture, logistics, maritime security, defence, and countless other parts of the economy that depend on timely, reliable information.
Of course, we don’t see this happening. And that’s part of the point. Like all good infrastructure, space tends to be noticed least when it works best. We notice it only when it fails.
In 2026, the “case for space” is stronger than ever. Space is worth about $600 billion today. McKinsey & Co. believes it could reach $1.8 trillion in 2035.. Our own analysis suggests space could reach $3.2 trillion in the next ten years. The sector is no longer a specialist market, nor is it a domain of national prestige. It’s part of the operating system of the world economy.’
🔸 In a panel moderated by NewSpace Capital’s Daniel Biedermann, the speakers considered the industrialisation of space, which has evolved from a cottage industry into an integrated network. Biedermann compared the growth of space to the development of the car industry in the 1930s:
“In every town, there were dozens of small car companies, each building its own thing in its own corner,” he said. “For cars to become mainstream, the industry needed an industrial push: standardisation, scale, and a more disciplined approach to product design.”
Johann du Toit, CEO of Simera Sense, added: “The days of designing to a perfect requirement, building the perfect instrument, and then launching it are gone. … We need to be focused on cost efficiency and on the supply chain. … We have to sit around the table, look at what’s happening, and look at what’s needed now.”
Dr Robert Brüll, CEO of FibreCoat, spoke of the importance of materials, and the legacy approach: ‘“Everything that we talk about and have is impossible without materials,” he said. “But the legacy system is slow, high-margin, and extremely expensive. We challenged that paradigm. The shift in space is only enabled if you have corresponding technologies that are low-cost.”
🔸 ‘Next-generation SatCom’ panellists, moderated by NewSpace’s Martin Halliwell, explored the future of communications:
“We don’t have the human capacity to be able to manage our space networks,” said SES CEO Adel al-Saleh. “AI gives us an opportunity to scale it to a very different level. …. You can use AI to do a lot more – design your payload, as an example, or at least the fundamentals of the payload, and then finalise it with human engineers.”
Air Marshal Andrew Turner CB CBE said, “The world now runs on near real-time information. That should change how we think about imagery and data. When you open Google Maps, why should you be looking at an image from six or nine months ago? Why shouldn’t the image be current enough that you can see yourself in it? I do not want to see a picture of a car pretending to be a live vehicle. I want to see what is actually there.”
🔸 Speakers on an Earth Observation panel, hosted by Axiom Space astronaut Michael Lopéz-Alegría, discussed how the demand for data was now effectively 'infinite, and that the availability of radio frequency spectrum and scarcity of optical ground stations represented obstacles to making the most of the data now available.
“The appetite for data is extraordinary,” said Steve Young, President of Satellite Missions at ICEYE. “Every satellite we launch is sold within a matter of weeks. We just have to keep launching more and more, but the more we can put up there, the more get taken. There seems to be no end to this. So the bottleneck then becomes, how fast can you get the data down, how fast can you process it and turn it into valuable insights and information?”
Jean-François Morizur, CEO of Cailabs, spoke about the role of radio when spectrum is increasingly limited. “Radio is extremely valuable, especially for direct to device, but we are asking it to do everything, and it’s starting to be a lot,” he said. “It’s a bottleneck in terms of spectrum allocation, a bottleneck in terms of bandwidth – pure bandwidth in a world where we want more resolution, we want information faster, and so on … If I get a picture nine hours after the ship has left the harbour, nobody cares.”’
Fredrick Fosse, CEO of Energy Aspects, added that traders did not to make the global energy market perfectly transparent, but needed enough information to have an advantage over their competitors.'