SES breaks ground on in-house satellite factory
What happened
SES broke ground on a 16,000-square-metre satellite manufacturing facility in Kockelscheuer, Luxembourg, on 24 September, with construction partners CDCL Group and ParcLuxite. The plant will handle engineering, manufacturing and testing, and is due to open in 2028. It will build hardware for SES's meoSphere network and assemble, integrate and test payloads for Europe's IRIS² programme. Luxembourg's prime minister and SES chief executive Adel Al-Saleh both spoke at the groundbreaking.
Read-across for SES
Owning production cuts SES's dependence on Thales Alenia Space, OHB and K2 Space for future fleets, the same verticalisation logic driving Rocket Lab's move into Iridium. It also backs the sovereignty pitch behind IRIS², since Luxembourg itself gains a manufacturing base rather than just funding one built elsewhere in Europe. The facility outlasts any single satellite order, giving SES a fixed asset to defend if IRIS² or meoSphere contracts slip.
As the brief filed it
[AGE: 1d] SES broke ground on a satellite manufacturing plant in Kockelscheuer, Luxembourg, due to open in 2028 to build meoSphere and IRIS² hardware in-house.