BERLIN and WASHINGTON — German defense behemoth Rheinmetall and Finnish satellite operator ICEYE announced today they have officially established a new joint venture to provide space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data to the burgeoning European market.
Called Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions, GmbH and headquartered in Neuss, Germany, the venture also includes German space startups Reflex Aerospace, OroraTech, ConstellR and LiveEO as “initial partners,” the press release says ― suggesting that the group would be amenable to adding other interested companies.
“The approach deliberately follows an open architecture. The objective is not to create isolated entities, but to build an open, resilient, expandable and long-term sovereign ISR platform. The partnership lays the foundation for scalable, long-term security and defence capabilities in Germany and Europe,” the joint press release explains.
Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger told reporters at the ILA Berlin Air Show that while the joint venture will welcome European partners, whether US firms would be embraced is less clear.
“I think it’s open for a lot of Europeans,” he said. “It is also open for US technologies, if the US is not, let me say, killing us in different areas [by saying]: ‘we cannot give this technology to Europe, or we give it but not… tomorrow’.”
ICEYE and Rheinmetall first announced plans to create the joint venture last November. Then in December, the German Ministry of Defence awarded the partnership a €1.7 billion ($1.99 billion) contract to develop and operate a new SAR constellation. And the two partners have been working together since last year to provide Ukraine’s military with SAR data.
Rafal Modrzewski, ICEYE co-founder and CEO, said at the ILA press conference that the joint venture is “looking at initial operational capabilities” this year and intends to begin satellite production “by the end of the summer.” The hope is to be fully operational by the end of next year, he added, ramping up production to two birds each year.
“If you want to build a program which provides you with real-time indications and warnings across multiple spectrums, you need hundreds of satellites. It’s just as simple as that,” Modrzewski said.
“Today, we are optimizing for speed. Each of us is building a little bit different systems, and we have busses that we operate on. So, I think the first solution will be a separate set of satellites, rather than one bird,” he elaborated. “How will this develop over time? I don’t know.”
The joint venture comes as European governments are increasingly concerned about building national security capabilities, especially in space, to become less reliant on the United States in the wake of the Trump administration’s oppositional stance towards Europe. Many countries, as well as the European Union as a collective, have been boosting their defense budgets over the last 18 months.
“Strategic autonomy in space has become an immediate operational requirement: the ability to collect, process and act on sovereign intelligence independently and at scale is a prerequisite for credible and cutting-edge defence,” the joint press release notes.
Papperger noted that Germany alone intends to invest up to €35 billion on space over the next “eight to nine years.”
Modrzewski said that Germany’s space ambitions will require thermal management system, satellite busses, “AI processing of geospatial,” and SAR capabilities — with the key advantage of SAR imaging its ability to see through cloud cover.
“So, we know already that we have a large part of the solution, but SIGINT [signals intelligence] may very well be the one thing that we will have to add,” he said.
PHOTOS: ILA Berlin 2026
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