For most of its life, IRIS² has been a program measured in documents: budget lines, ministerial commitments, an implementation agreement signed and re-signed as member states argued over cost. On Aug. 31, that changed. SES announced it had awarded German satellite builder OHB a contract worth almost €1 billion to design and build all 18 medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) satellites for the constellation — the first major piece of hardware business to come out of a program that has, until now, mostly generated paperwork.
The award lands just three and a half weeks after the European Commission and the SpaceRISE consortium — SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat — signed the implementation agreement that formally kicked off construction of Europe's answer to Starlink and OneWeb. If that Aug. 7 signing was the starting gun, OHB's contract is the first satellite actually rolling off it.
What OHB Is Building
Each of the 18 satellites will weigh in at a launch mass of roughly 2.6 tonnes and produce about 15 kilowatts of power — respectable figures for a MEO communications platform, sitting well above the smaller broadband satellites that populate low Earth orbit constellations. OHB is responsible for developing and manufacturing all 18 platforms under the contract, according to SES and reporting from SatelliteToday and European Spaceflight.
OHB CEO Marco Fuchs framed the award in political as much as commercial terms, calling it "another significant step toward Europe's independence." That language is not incidental. IRIS² was conceived from the outset as a sovereignty project — a way for the EU and its member states to field secure government and commercial connectivity without leaning on American or Chinese satellite infrastructure. A near-billion-euro check to a German manufacturer for the constellation's MEO backbone is exactly the kind of outcome that pitch was built to produce.
How the Constellation Is Divided Up
IRIS² is not a single company's satellites stacked into orbit — it's a federation. SpaceRISE splits the work three ways: SES leads the MEO segment, which is where OHB's 18 satellites will fly; Eutelsat manages the much larger low-Earth-orbit segment, 330 satellites strong; and Hispasat is responsible for government ground infrastructure. Total constellation size, once complete, is 348 satellites.
The manufacturing base extends beyond OHB. ESA has named Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, and Aerospacelab among the program's major satellite builders, spreading production — and jobs, and political buy-in — across multiple EU member states. OHB's award covers only the MEO tier; contracts for the far larger LEO fleet, under Eutelsat's management, have not been detailed in the same way.
Money and Timeline
IRIS² carries a headline price tag of €15.6 billion, funded through a mix of EU budget allocations running from 2028 to 2034 and direct contributions from member states — Spain alone has committed between €1.6 billion and €2 billion. OHB's near-€1 billion contract for 18 satellites represents a meaningful slice of that total, though SpaceRISE has not broken out how the remaining budget divides between the LEO segment, ground infrastructure, and program overhead.
On schedule: ESA and the contract reporting point to first launches in 2029, with initial services expected to begin in 2030. That's a tight runway for satellites of this size and complexity — 2.6 tonnes with 15-kilowatt power systems typically imply multi-year build cycles even before qualification testing and launch campaigns are factored in. Whether OHB can hit 2029 for all 18 platforms, rather than a phased rollout, is the kind of detail that tends to slip in large government-backed satellite programs, and neither ESA's announcement nor the contract reporting specifies a build cadence.
Why It Matters
IRIS² has spent years as a program defined by ambition and delay — a sovereign alternative to SpaceX's Starlink and the UK-backed OneWeb that kept slipping its own milestones while the EU argued over cost-sharing and industrial policy. The Aug. 7 implementation agreement was supposed to end that phase. OHB's contract is the first concrete evidence that it has: real money, a named builder, a satellite mass and power spec, and a launch year.
It also clarifies what "sovereignty" means in practice for this program. IRIS² isn't being built by one national champion — it's being assembled from pieces awarded to OHB, Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, and Aerospacelab, orchestrated by a three-company consortium (SES, Eutelsat, Hispasat) that itself spans Luxembourg, France, and Spain. That's a very European way to build a constellation: distributed manufacturing, distributed funding, distributed political ownership. It's also a structure with more coordination risk than a single prime contractor model — more schedules to sync, more interfaces to manage, more chances for one segment's delay to cascade into another's.
For the immediate future, OHB's award is the marker to watch. If the company is cutting metal on the first MEO platform on a timeline consistent with 2029 launches, IRIS² has genuinely entered its hardware phase. If that date starts moving, it will be the first sign that Europe's sovereign network is repeating the delays that defined its planning years — just with satellites on the assembly line instead of agreements on the negotiating table.
