SES Brings Satellite Manufacturing Home for the First Time in 40 Years

Few corporate strategy shifts say more about where the satellite industry is heading than this one: SES, the Luxembourg-based operator that has spent 40 years buying its hardware from prime contractors, is bringing satellite design, integration and manufacturing in-house. The new entity is anchored in a national Space Campus in Luxembourg, framed as both an industrial bet and a national-resilience project.

Why now

CEO Adel Al-Saleh has been explicit about the rationale. The sector is undergoing what he describes as a rapid and profound transformation: software-defined payloads, multi-orbit constellations, satellite-to-phone connectivity, and shorter design cycles all reward operators who can iterate hardware on their own clock. Outsourcing the entire chain to traditional primes leaves operators waiting in queues priced for governments and defence agencies.

Bringing key parts of the supply chain in-house — design, integration, and the technologies most central to the company's product roadmap — gives SES more control over schedule, cost and architecture. Al-Saleh has separately been named Satellite Executive of the Year for 2025, a recognition that gives the strategic shift extra political weight inside the industry.

The Luxembourg Space Campus

Operationally, the project takes shape as a national Space Campus in Luxembourg, gathering R&D, integration capacity and partner facilities in a single ecosystem. Luxembourg's Ministry of the Economy and the Luxembourg Space Agency have championed the move as the next industrial layer above the existing SpaceResources.lu policy stack: from law and finance to actual satellite hardware.

Implications for the wider ecosystem

For Luxembourg, the Space Campus does several things at once. It deepens the country's position as a serious satellite hub rather than a corporate domicile, it creates skilled engineering jobs that anchor mid-career talent, and it gives the government a credible industrial story to tell in Brussels around space sovereignty.

For SES customers — governments, telecoms, mobility operators — it promises faster iteration cycles and tighter integration between MEO, GEO and emerging direct-to-device offerings. SES has separately taken a strategic stake in the combined Lynk Global / Omnispace entity expected to close in early 2026, signalling that direct-to-phone satellite services are part of the same strategic stack.

The risk

Vertical integration is hard. The history of telecom and satellite operators that tried to swallow their supply chain is mixed at best. SES is betting that the current technological inflection — and Luxembourg's willingness to back the campus politically — outweighs that legacy. If it works, the Grand Duchy's space story stops being mostly about regulation and finance and starts being about steel and silicon.