Open Cosmos, an alumnus of ESA Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) in Harwell, UK, has had an eventful journey in 2024. Having closed over €100 million in contracts, the company is continuing its growth with satellite manufacturing facilities and teams at four locations in Europe.
The support from ESA has been instrumental in this journey, providing not only initial incubation but also ongoing collaboration and opportunities for innovation.
From the stratosphere to Earth orbit
When founder Rafel Jorda Siquier set out with his satellite-as-a-service company, he wanted to help solve big global challenges, like climate change, with the help of space data. Today, almost ten years later, Open Cosmos designs, manufactures, and operates satellites suited to their customers’ needs. With ten satellites launched to date, applications range from observation over telecommunication to navigation and science.
Rafel can pinpoint the exact moment he realised he wanted to make an impact in the space industry: during his second year at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, he participated in a student project, sending a stratospheric balloon into Earth’s atmosphere. From tens of kilometres down below, the students remotely controlled a camera onboard the balloon to snap a picture. Rafel remembers the image to this day: “From up there, you could see the curvature of the Earth, a thin layer of the atmosphere, the dark sky above with all of the stars and the Sun. It was as if the pictures had been taken from the International Space Station” he recalls.
Inspired by how far he and his colleagues had gotten with €300 and a few weekends’ worth of engineering, Rafel continued his career in the space industry. After working at space start-ups in his university days, he took up a job at Airbus. There, he was granted an MBA, a crucial step for Rafel: having grown comfortable in the world of business, he was able to start ideating the business model of Open Cosmos.
Joining the network
Instead of immediately seeking out investors or raising funds, Rafel chose to focus first on finding potential customers for his idea. It was not long before his search brought him to ESA, more specifically to the European Space Education Resource Office (ESERO) project. When Rafel was hired to support ESERO with electronics for an upcoming initiative, he quickly had to incorporate the company, choosing to settle in the UK.
With the vision and location set, Rafel needed to get more people on board. He turned to the people who had been part of his engineering studies, trying to convince them to join Open Cosmos. To get them on board, however, “We needed a real satellite project” Rafel explains. This opportunity came soon, when Open Cosmos got to act as a backup company for a programme by the European Commission. In under nine months, the team delivered their first satellite. “That finally made us more than just a wannabe satellite company, but a real satellite delivery company” he adds.
Getting acquainted with the UK space community, Rafel was encouraged to apply to the ESA Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) in Harwell. In 2016, he and his team started their time in the incubator. Aside from strengthening Open Cosmos’ relationship with ESA, Rafel highlights the environment created by the incubator: “There are a lot of smart people in the cohorts at ESA BIC, some of them became our customers, some of them our suppliers. The fact that this not only happens at a national level, but also at a pan-European level, helped us a lot”. To this day, he maintains a positive relationship with ESA BICs, sharing his experience with incubatees in locations across the network.
An engineer working on a CubeSat at one of Open Cosmos’ facilities. Credit: Open Cosmos
A clear path to space data accessibility
Looking back at pitch decks from these early days, Rafel is surprised at how little Open Cosmos’ value proposition has changed. The initial roadmap included three steps: an end-to-end satellite service, an Earth Observation constellation, and generating downstream analytical solutions from the collected data. While the latter two ideas, realised since as the Open Constellation and Open Data, have been adapted over the years, the company has had little need to pivot.
“I think we were quite visionary at the time. Now it’s obvious that satellite-as-a-service is a thing, but ten years ago no one was doing it” Rafel says. He credits the people behind Open Cosmos as a key factor for the company’s success, finding high praise for his “phenomenally talented, diverse, and ambitious” team. However, he is happy to admit that timing and luck were also a big part of the equation.
From challenges to opportunities
Despite the many successes along his entrepreneurial path, it has not been without challenges for Rafel. Over the years, he and his team have learned to embrace the discomfort: “We like things that are useful, and sometimes those things are difficult, but we don’t get scared. We always try to turn those difficulties into our biggest opportunities”.
This was also the case during the COVID pandemic, where many customers suddenly could no longer follow through on contracts with Open Cosmos. In this stressful, unsure period, being part of the ESA network was an essential support system to the young company: when other customers were failing to complete their payments, ESA could still uphold their contracts.
However, from the most challenging moments come the biggest lessons learned. According to Rafel, acting fast and dealing with the outcomes is the way to go, rather than avoiding making those tough decisions. And difficult times can help bring us together: protecting suppliers and partners as well as ensuring timely payments has strengthened the trust across Open Cosmos’ supply chain. It also highlighted the need for transparency with employees, fostering an honest environment in the company.
Investing into strong relationships has paid off for Open Cosmos. The year has brought international expansion of operations and many contracts for the company. These include projects with ESA for testing the latest capabilities of artificial intelligence onboard Open Cosmos’ Earth Observation satellites and monitoring Earth’s magnetic field. “We are delivering a lot of satellites, customers are very happy, so this is a very sweet moment” Rafel summarises with a smile.
This article was written for the occasion of the 20 years anniversary of ESA BIC in Europe.
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