Open Cosmos

Open Cosmos builds and operates small satellites for customers who want the mission without the engineering organisation. From Harwell in the UK, with sites in Spain and Portugal, it takes on design, build, launch and operations, then hands over the data. For ESA it was prime contractor on Phisat-2, a cubesat running artificial intelligence applications in orbit, launched in August 2024. For Spain it is building eight satellites of the Atlantic Constellation, a shared Earth observation fleet with Portugal.

The bet is that many governments want sovereign satellite capability and the smaller ones do not want to build a space agency to get it. Shared constellations are the mechanism: each country buys satellites into a common fleet and draws data from the whole of it.

The company has been widening its aim. It bought the Portuguese satellite IoT firm Connected in 2025, launched satellites testing 6G connectivity that November, flew its first two telecom satellites in January 2026 and announced a connectivity constellation of its own. That points one mid-sized company at Earth observation, IoT and broadband at once, three markets with different economics and, in the last of them, far better funded competition. The satellites it has flown are real; the constellations are mostly still announcements, and the customers so far are chiefly agencies and governments, whose budgets move at their own pace.