SpaceTech — Letting me see the space world from different angles.

Sometime in 2010, I found myself at DLR wondering what came next. YES2 had been a formative experience, building real hardware, learning real systems engineering. But it had also shown me how much I didn’t know. I was an electrical engineer who had stumbled into space through a combination of curiosity and luck, and the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be felt wide. I started looking for something that would close it deliberately.

SpaceTech was unusual enough that it took me a while to understand what it actually was. A Master’s degree, awarded by Delft University of Technology, but delivered in five intensive two-week residential sessions scattered across Europe, not a distance-learning programme, not a traditional campus degree, but something specifically designed for mid-career space professionals who were still working full-time. The curriculum covered systems engineering, business engineering, mission analysis, earth observation, navigation, telecommunications, and something called interpersonal skills and leadership development, which I suspect I underestimated at the time.

It was DLR that sent me. The programme had been running since the late 1990s, awarded by Delft while it still had its home there — it would later move to Graz — and DLR had been a consistent supporter of it. In the cohort I joined, SpaceTech 13, my fellow participants came from DLR, ESA, the Italian Space Agency, Boeing, Astrium, Critical Software, ANGKASA in Malaysia, and Delft itself. Fifteen people, six nationalities, a combined century and a half of space industry experience in one room. The average career experience in the room when we started was probably around ten years.

Five Cities, Five Sessions

The format was deliberate and, in retrospect, clever. Rather than taking students out of their jobs for a year, SpaceTech brought the programme to where the industry lived. Each session was hosted by a different institution at a different location, which meant you weren’t just attending lectures in a generic classroom, you were spending two weeks at Delft, two weeks in Toulouse - visiting CNES, a split session of one week at DLR in Munich and one week at the lake of Costance, two weeks at ESA’s ESRIN in Frascati, and the final session for two weeks at ESA’s ESTEC in Noordwijk.

The effect of this on the programme was significant in ways that are hard to articulate without having been there. When you spend two weeks at ESRIN and the people running your earth observation module are walking you down the hall to show you actual satellite imagery processing in production, the material lands differently than it would in a lecture theatre. When you’re at ESTEC for your systems engineering module and you can look out the window at the Large Space Simulator, the sense of what systems engineering actually produces becomes concrete in a way that no textbook quite achieves. The locations weren’t incidental. They were part of the curriculum.

There was also something valuable about the rhythm of it. Two weeks away, fully immersed, then back to your normal job for a few months — absorbing what you’d learned in a real context while also continuing to work on the CCP remotely — then two weeks away again. I found myself constantly testing ideas from the sessions against the work I was doing at DLR, and vice versa. The programme and the job fed each other. It was overall a really tiring but very rewarding year.

The Cohort

If the locations were one distinctive feature of SpaceTech, the people in the room were the other. Fifteen participants sounds small, and it is — deliberately so. You got to know everyone properly. More importantly, you got to work with everyone properly, because the programme’s structure meant you were constantly collaborating across every boundary you could think of: technical discipline, nationality, employer, seniority.

SpaceTech 13 was genuinely multinational in a way that felt different from the usual conference diversity. We had Italians from ASI, a Malaysian contingent from ANGKASA, Germans from DLR, an American from Boeing, an Australian from Astrium, ESA staff from various countries, a Portuguese colleague from Critical Software, and a professor from Delft. The work we did together was real work — not contrived exercises but actual technical and business analysis where different people’s backgrounds produced genuinely different approaches.

I had come from the hardware side, from hands-on systems engineering. Some of my colleagues had spent their careers in mission analysis, in commercial contracts, in ground segment operations. Working alongside them for nearly a year forced me to understand space projects from different angles. The business engineering module, which I had probably ranked lowest in my expectations going in, turned out to be one of the most eye-opening parts of the entire programme. Satellite missions don’t exist in a vacuum (pun intended); they need to be funded, justified, marketed, and sustained. The people at DLR and ESA who do the technical work and the people who decide which technical work gets done are not always talking to each other as clearly as they should be.

MOBEO: Letting the World See the World

At the heart of SpaceTech was the Central Case Project — a year-long exercise in which the cohort formed a virtual company, defined a mission concept, and developed it from market analysis through to technical design and business case, culminating in a full proposal pitched to a panel of senior industry figures acting as investors.

The challenge set for SpaceTech 13 was to find an innovative, credible business concept to deliver accurate, up-to-date, and relevant geo-information to the mobile mass market. The brief sounds deceptively simple. What it actually required was the team to work across the entire value chain of a space system: satellite design, ground segment architecture, data processing, service delivery, market analysis, pricing models, regulatory considerations, and investment strategy — simultaneously, under time pressure, with no single person having all the expertise required.

We called our company MOBEO. The vision we settled on — letting the world see the world — was to operate a constellation of 17 satellites, combining optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft, capable of imaging the entire land mass of the Earth at one-meter resolution within a week. Not for governments or defence agencies, but for ordinary people on mobile devices. The geo-information market in 2011 was worth around $6 billion annually, with what we estimated to be a much larger untapped commercial mass market that the existing players — imagery providers like DigitalGlobe, location services like Google Maps, platforms like the early app stores — had not yet figured out how to connect. MOBEO would bridge those worlds.

The technical solution we designed was serious. Twelve optical satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit at 530 km, each carrying a 75 cm telescope imaging in panchromatic and multispectral bands. Five SAR spacecraft at 510 km, X-band, 3-meter resolution, cloud-independent — because an optical-only constellation cannot guarantee weekly coverage of any point on Earth when cloud cover is factored in. Both types sharing common bus architecture to reduce cost. Ground stations at Svalbard and Fairbanks, chosen for their high-latitude access time advantage with sun-synchronous orbits. Eight hundred GPU-based servers for image processing. A Geo-Innovation Platform — essentially the App Store model applied to satellite imagery — connecting external developers and data providers to end users through micro-transactions.

The business case we built projected $40 billion in company value and $12 billion in annual revenue within fifteen years, based on 20% penetration of the addressable market, financed through a staged investment strategy starting with $50 million from founding partners and building through private equity to a public offering in year five. The numbers were ambitious. But the analysis behind them was rigorous — we had genuinely worked through the market sizing, the competitive landscape, the cost models, and the sensitivity analyses across multiple scenarios.

We presented the final proposal at ESTEC in June 2011. We also presented a condensed version at the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town that October, which is how it entered the public record.

What the CCP Actually Taught

Looking back, the Central Case Project was more interesting for what it demanded of the process than for what it produced. The output was a business proposal. The input was fifteen people with strong individual technical backgrounds, working part-time, across half a dozen time zones, with competing instincts about what a good solution looked like and no prior shared language for resolving those conflicts.

In the early phases, this produced exactly the friction you’d expect. The engineers wanted to optimize the constellation. The business-oriented members wanted to get to market faster. The systems people kept pointing out that the ground segment was being underspecified. Everyone had a different definition of what “affordable to the mass market” meant. The sessions in Toulouse and Munich were technically rich but also genuinely tense at times — the kind of tension that comes from a group of competent people who don’t yet share enough context to disagree efficiently.

By the final session in Noordwijk, something had shifted. The friction was still there, but it had become productive. We had developed enough shared language, enough mutual trust, and enough accumulated context about each other’s instincts to move faster. The debates were still real, but the resolution was quicker. The presentation we gave to the investor panel was coherent in a way that the early drafts had not been.

I’ve thought about that shift often since then. What changed wasn’t that we agreed more. It was that we had built the infrastructure — personal, professional, methodological — to make disagreement useful rather than costly. That’s an organizational capability, and it’s one of the things SpaceTech was quietly building through the structure of the programme, whether or not that was explicitly the stated objective.

The Network

Fifteen people is not a large number. But fifteen people from DLR, ESA, ASI, Boeing, Astrium, Critical Software, and ANGKASA, all having spent a year working closely enough together that you know how each person thinks — that is a remarkably durable professional network.

In the years since, I’ve crossed paths with SpaceTech 13 alumni at conferences, on proposals, and in institutions across Europe. In the space industry, which is smaller than it looks, there is real value in having worked closely with someone before you need to rely on them professionally. You already know what they consider carefully and what they tend to overlook. You know when they’re being cautious and when they’re being genuinely worried. You know who to call when you have a question in a domain that isn’t yours.

The programme also introduced me to people beyond the cohort — the coaches, the faculty, the senior figures who came to review the CCP. Some of those connections have mattered more than I expected at the time.

What It Opened Up

When SpaceTech 13 finished in 2011, I went back to DLR with a different perspective on what I was doing there and why. The business engineering module had changed how I thought about programme justification and stakeholder management. The systems engineering module had deepened my existing knowledge while also challenging some assumptions I’d carried forward uncritically from YES2. The CCP had given me experience leading and coordinating across a diverse team under genuine time pressure toward a real deliverable.

Within a relatively short time, I took on new responsibilities at DLR that I don’t think I would have been in a position to pursue as confidently without the programme. More broadly, it planted seeds that have grown slowly but persistently since — an interest in the business side of the industry that the purely technical track had never really fed, a sharper awareness of where technical capability and strategic thinking need to connect, and a clearer sense of what I eventually want to do with the combination.

SpaceTech also gave me my first sustained exposure to the intersection of space systems and the commercial internet economy — a theme that was speculative in 2011 and is now reshaping the entire industry. MOBEO was, in retrospect, a fairly accurate description of what companies like Planet and Capella Space and a dozen others would go on to attempt, with mixed success, over the following decade. We had the analysis broadly right. What was missing, in 2011, was the falling launch costs and the miniaturisation of satellite hardware that would eventually make the economics work at smaller scale than we had modelled. Whether MOBEO as conceived would have succeeded is genuinely unknowable — but working through the problem was valuable regardless of the answer.

The SpaceTech programme at TU Delft is no longer at Delft. It moved to Graz, where it continues under a different institutional home but, from what I understand, a similar philosophy. I’m glad I did it when I did it, in the cohort I did it with, at the institutions we visited. The sessions at ESTEC had a particular resonance for me — I had first visited Noordwijk as a student on YES2, learning to solder space-rated connectors in a clean room. Returning years later as a working engineer to study systems engineering in the building next door felt like something closing and something else opening at the same time.

That’s probably the most honest description of what SpaceTech was for me: not a credential, though the Master’s degree from Delft is real, but a transition. A deliberate step from one version of a career to the next, taken with fifteen people worth knowing, through five cities worth visiting, on a project worth doing.